Clinical effects of healing environments

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHSTrust manages a total of 870 beds, 47 in-patient wards across three sites, housing 982 medical staff, 1,660 qualified nurses, 1,717 allied health professionals and 1,757 support staff. It offers both regional and tertiary services in terms of renal dialysis and renal transplant, and the hospital houses a state-of-the-art haematology unit, and cares for patients with very complex pancreatic conditions. On average, the Trust sees 54,000 inpatient admissions, 568,000 outpatient visits, and 88,000 A&E attendances and 86,000 day cases per year. The organisation has been rated ‘Double excellent’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Ms Wake took up the position as director of infection prevention and control at the Trust three years ago. Explaining the journey undertaken by the Trust in relation to HCAIs, she said: “In the time I have been here focusing on this agenda, it has sometimes felt like we were working against the tide. One of the keys to reducing HCAIs has been the hard work that has gone into embedding our mission vision and values throughout the organisation and everyone’s commitment across the board to reducing healthcare-associated infection.” The hospital has received Government approval to build a new hospital, to replace the existing ageing Royal Liverpool University Hospital and it is hoped that this will be completed by 2016. The new hospital will consist of 100% single rooms, all with en suite facilities. The current Royal Liverpool Hospital site has very limited single room accommodation, with the majority of accommodation on the inpatient areas being six-bedded bays. “In the acute medical unit, which takes all the emergency GP medical referrals we only have one single room, making it a challenge to safely isolate and manage patients,” said Ms Wake. “The commitment and dedication of our staff and their vigilance on this agenda has been key.”

Hospitals can be uninviting places. Intuitively, you would think that stark, cold interiors with no outside views do not lend themselves to convalescence and there is an increasing amount of work being carried out to suggest that environments that make use of intelligent technology to improve the patient’s experience can reduce stress and anxiety and even accelerate and improve treatment outcomes. With this in mind, Philips Healthcare has considered an alternative approach to healing environments, though the development of the Ambient Experience solution, designed for medical imaging rooms and emergency departments. A mix of architecture, design and technology, Ambient Experience uses lighting, sound and projection to create a space that is designed to reduce the anxiety and increase the comfort of children that are being scanned, while improving the hospital workflow. “We have seen how our approach has worked with imaging rooms, so we started to look at other areas of the hospital,” said Thomas van Elzakker, general manager at Philips Ambient Experience. The result is Philips’ new Hospital Area, occupying an entire floor of the company’s Experience Lab at its research centre in Eindhoven, Holland. Philips has recreated the floor as a realistic hospital environment, complete with nursing station, waiting room, patient rooms and corridors. Initially, Philips is majoring its efforts in three specific areas: 

• Reducing patient anxiety during cancer diagnostics in a PET-CT uptake room.