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Healthcare Design Magazine’s Interview with Roger Ulrich
Healthcare Design Magazine recently had an interview with Roger Ulrich, the most widely known researcher in the Evidence Based Design (EBD) world. Ulrich currently lives in Sweden and serves as guest professor of architecture for the Centre for Healthcare Architecture at Chalmers University of Technology. He will be awarded the Changemaker Award at this year’s Healthcare Design Expo & Conference in November. Below are some of the questions and excerpts from his interview. To read the entire interview, click here.
Healthcare Design: What’s your take on the state of the evidence-based design (EBD) movement today?
Roger Ulrich: Five years ago, in another interview for Healthcare Design, I noted that the research in this area had progressed a lot. And in the five years since then, the progress has continued, no question. I’m encouraged today by both the increase in quantity and especially the quality of EBD studies.
Going back to 2008, when I last led a literature survey, more than 90 percent of the good research was in medical journals. One had to look widely to find it in different branches of medicine and nursing. Now there’s HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal focusing on EBD, and I think that’s helped stimulate research and give more focus to the field. And university design programs today are hiring EBD researchers and designers at the graduate level to supervise masters and PhD students. This is an energetic, growing, alive field.
Can you give an example of some of the new issues being investigated?
There are several. One good example, and this has been a game-changer internationally, is highlighted by a study done here in Sweden where Karolinska University Hospital renovated a wing in a 1970s building that houses high-acuity NICU babies. The clinicians in the department had for years tried to implement a family-centered care model but were prevented by the fact that the old NICU had open bays with multiple incubators. About seven years ago the department was renovated to become a single-family design layout, where even Level 3 babies (who are very premature and vulnerable, 24-28 weeks gestation), could be with their moms within about four hours after C-section. Instead of mom being assigned a bed in a different unit, mom and dad are now with the baby continuously in a private room in the renovated unit. Even a 25-week baby can be on their mother’s chest for skin-to-skin contact and bonding soon after delivery. Importantly, the clinicians developed and implemented an integrated bundle of family-centered care interventions and components. The architectural renovation is what made implementing the new care model possible.
What made this project a game-changer is that the researchers randomly assigned half of about 360 preterm infants to the new unit, and the other half to the old-style unit that limited the presence of the mom and dad and the amount of training and information they could be given. The new unit cut length of stay in Level 3 intensive care by more than 10 days, and reduced mortality. Several other clinical outcomes were also improved: Infants got to healthier weights faster, and the families were better informed and coped better.
Some people in the industry, however, have voiced frustration regarding EBD, suggesting that there’s nothing significant happening right now.
Why isn’t there more awareness of EBD research, or the progress I’ve been referring to? I’ve heard this comment a couple of times myself in northern Europe over the past year. When you hear it from informed people or practitioners, it’s worth stopping and thinking about why they have that view.
I think, frankly, part of the explanation goes back to a critique that many university-based design researchers and teachers have made over the years, that architects and designers generally don’t read much research. Perhaps some healthcare design practitioners do more profession-related reading than average, and there’s a lot for them to read—trends in healthcare, management journals—a lot of diverse information is out there. Not reading research is understandable up to a point; it takes time. The great majority of original research articles appear in scientific or medical journals. The language is technical, descriptions of research methods are complex and scientific… it can be hard slogging.
Source: http://www.healthcaredesignmagazine.com/article/seeds-change-interview-roger-ulrich
