Existing space in hospitals is a valuable resource that historically has been overlooked as organizations focus on renovating and expanding their physical plants. With fluctuating workloads, rapidly changing technology, staff turnover, and limited access to capital in today’s dynamic healthcare environment, hospital leaders are increasingly looking for ways to better use what they already have. They are also committed to building flexible space when they do renovate or start from scratch.
How To Articles
Learn how to determine facility capacity, estimate bed need, plan specialized facilities, and much more.
Factors Affecting the Size of a Surgery Suite
The hospital surgery suite has undergone revolutionary change over the past several decades. For a long time, the focus has been on shifting surgery to a lower-cost outpatient setting. This has been replaced with a focus on lowering both the costs and risks of surgery with the ongoing migration from invasive to less-invasive surgery or noninvasive procedures. Minimally-invasive, image-guided, robotic, and telesurgery ― along with intraoperative imaging techniques ― continue to replace traditional surgical procedures. Aside from the economies of scale achieved with larger surgical suites, the biggest single factor contributing to the overall footprint of the surgery suite is the size and specialization of the individual operating rooms (ORs). Other factors include the proportion of outpatient surgery performed in the suite, and the type of patient care spaces provided, as well as the efficiency of the surgical suite layout.
Physician Offices and Outpatient Clinics: Key Space Allocation Factors
There is significant variation in the amount of space planned to accommodate a specific number of annual outpatient visits to a physician office or outpatient clinic. In some cases the department gross square feet (DGSF) may be more than double for the same workload — even when the types of patients seen and physician specialties are similar.
Ten Key Questions When Planning the Clinical Laboratory
Laboratory testing has grown from a manual, “hands-on” process providing a simple test menu — with staff organized by testing methodology or discipline in multiple small rooms — to an automated, multidisciplinary, high-volume instrument-centric clinical enterprise. A visit to a hospital laboratory today reveals a varying array and number of instruments, often operating with little human intervention. While test volume and staffing were once used to determine the amount of space in a laboratory, today, the instruments and degree of automation dictate the test volume capacity. The number of staff required to support the instrumentation is then determined.
Consolidating Healthcare Facilities Requires a Unique Facility Planning Process
Hospital mergers and acquisitions continue to increase at a rapid rate with precedent-setting deals occurring in 2018. Given that this a primary business strategy for a majority of healthcare organizations, this trend is expected to continue into 2019 and beyond. One of the many challenges that newly merged healthcare systems face is eliminating redundant services and surplus capacity. Realigning services and reallocating resources among multiple campuses requires a unique strategic, operations improvement, and facility planning process. The planning team needs to understand the market and patient population, look at alternate ways of allocating resources, and evaluate the impact on operational costs, before recommending investments in bricks and mortar. This article looks at opportunities for improving efficiency and eliminating surplus capacity, separating major issues from less important issues, and other key considerations.