Health

From appropriate lighting to comfortable chairs, the health of your employees is important!  This section focuses on overall employee health, as well as the healthcare industry and how care and facility design impacts your organization.

Bright Idea: Personal Control for Office Lighting

Providing light for the workplace has always been at the top of the list for those who build and manage offices. However, they have tended to focus on the effects lighting has on a building’s performance, often at the expense of the people who work there. The cause of this focus has been the rising costs of real estate and energy.

Embracing Boomers – How Workplace Design for Maturing Knowledge Workers Benefits Everyone

Environmental Health

Giving patients better quality care requires an overhaul of many things. Architecture is one of them, says Derek Parker of Anshen + Allen. With major spending projected for new healthcare construction, he thinks now is the time to start building patient-centered facilities shaped by evidence-based design. He shares his insights in this conversation, one of a series between us and leading architecture and design firms.

Everybody Deserves a Good Chair

Healthful Patient Seating: Perspectives from Caregivers and Researchers

Herman Miller researchers talked with caregivers around the country and heard one response over and over again: “Make the patient chair work for me, and make it comfortable for my patient.” When questioned on what this meant, healthcare professionals answered consistently: a chair that is comfortable, functional, and durable.

Healthier Planet, Healthier People: Hospitals Go Green to “First, Do No Harm.”

Home Sweet Office – Comfort in the Workplace

Comfort is as elusive as the blind men’s elephant. Is it long and skinny like a snake or round and thick like a tree? Is it a neutral state—the “absence of awareness?” Or is it a positive sense of ease and contentment? Is it a noun (comforter), or is it a verb (to comfort)? Is it an outcome or a process?

If the Chair Fits

The old adage, “People come in all shapes and sizes,” is a tired cliché to a lot of people. To those who design and manufacture office chairs, it’s a daily reminder of the difficult task they face: making chairs that fit a tremendously varied population. Walk through the offices of just about any company and you’ll see people of vastly different sizes and proportions.

It’s All About Me – The Benefits of Personal Control at Work

As the ways we work change and the work itself changes, people look for ways to cope. For most that means “tuning” where they work to the way they work and who they are. Having some control over the workspace can improve comfort and the ability to get work done and reduce stress. This, in turn, can lead to greater productivity and better health. Having some control also allows people to “own” a workspace, which gives others a sense of who they are.

Making a Case for Case Carts

Hospitals are under intense pressure to cut costs everywhere, especially in the surgical suite. An efficiently run OR can be an attractive profit center, but it is also one of the most expensive departments to manage. While quality patient care is always the first priority, cost containment pressures are forcing surgery departments to operate as efficient business units as well.

Patient Rooms – A Changing Scene of Healing

The hospital is still the place where patients and their families, caregivers, and administrators come together for the common purpose of restoring a patient to good health. The issues each of these parties face all come into sharp focus in the patient room. It is there that the delivery of care is undergoing more change than at any other point in history.

Patterns of Care and Facility Design

Some healthcare organizations are adopting the techniques of lean manufacturing to identify the best patterns of care. As a result of aligning people with efficient processes and logical layouts, they are controlling costs even as they are improving patient outcomes. For them, and the lean consultants advising them, the value of flexible facilities and modular furnishings is becoming increasingly apparent.

Sound Practices: Noise Control in the Healthcare Environment

“Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well,” Florence Nightingale wrote in her 1859 book, Notes on Nursing.1 Understanding the basics of sound transmission and measurement is essential to a realistic assessment of a facility’s sound environment.

The Siren Song of Multitasking

Personal technology has become so ubiquitous that it seems unnecessary to quote statistics about the growth of cell phone use (every minute another 1,000 users are added to the 2.4 billion existing users), the global growth rate of Internet use (200 percent between 2000 and 2006), or how many e-mail messages and instant messages compete for our attention every day (an estimated 62 billion and 14 billion, respectively). In fact, technology use of this kind is increasing so rapidly that statistics like these are outdated as soon as they are documented.

When Work and Life Balance, Everyone Wins

What do employees want? It’s an important question for companies around the world as they gear up for the labor shortage that experts and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics say is almost upon us. Within a few years, U.S. companies will be down six million workers, and between 2015 and 2025 there will be between 10 million and 16 million fewer workers than there are jobs.