Designing New Hospitals - Who Cares About the Patients?

The design of hospital environments and processes impactspatients’ experiences and feelings. This paper explores howpatients’ experiences are considered in the design process ofnew hospitals, specifically focusing on the use of co-designmethods including patients. Prior work, largely focused onimprovements to ongoing care processes, has highlighted avariety of challenges. Our investigation reflects on observa-tions from weekly planning meetings and the use of virtualreality tools in the design phase of two new hospitals. Ourfindings suggest that, although opportunities exist for pa-tient experience-centric innovation, the tight schedules andintangibility of new-build limit what is achievable.