Occupancy and Patient Care Quality Benefits of Private Room Designs for Five Different Children’s Hospital Intensive Care Units – A Human Factors Evaluation

Abstract

This report summarizes findings from a human factors evaluation of private patient room (PR) designs for five different types of intensive care units (ICUs) in a children’s hospital, after conversion from multi-bed designs. The objective was to ascertain if PR designs benefit occupancy and patient care quality on these units. Past research has documented quality benefits of PR designs with NICUs, but possible PR design benefits for the other unit types have not previously been documented. Staff comments, task activity analysis observations, and responses to ranking questions on an occupancy and patient care quality perceptual response survey, were collected. For most PR quality attributes, quality rankings by CVCC staff are consistently lower than those by staff on the other four units. Staff perceptions of quality levels for most PR quality attributes are about the same, or lower than, those for multi-bed designs. This latter finding is aligned with comments by unit staff targeting numerous quality defects with the PR patient care environments. Collectively, the results suggest that the design, operation and management of the PR patient care environments on the five different units confront a challenge in realizing occupancy and patient care quality benefits that match experience with NICU PR designs in other contexts.