ICU helps in building healing environment

 Two of the project’s key goals, and indeed major design drivers, were to reduce to the absolute minimum the risk of hospital-acquired infection, and to provide an environment that ‘intentionally fosters staff and patient well-being, rather than just housing staff and patients’.

This is a case study of Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU). It has a building design driven by the risk of hospital-acquired infection, while providing an environment that intentionally fosters staff and patient wellbeing, rather than just housing staff and patients. Design drivers such as these are having a significant impact on hospital design around the world, and the case of the Alfred ICU can provide insight into potential challenges and solutions. A brief review of literature indicates just how significant the issue of hospitalacquired infection (HAI) is. A World Health Organisation (WHO) survey indicated that an average of almost 9% of patients in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, South- East Asia, and Western Pacific, had hospital-acquired infections (WHO 2002). In Australia, it is estimated that, each year, there are in the order of 200,000 hospitalacquired infections, resulting in around two million bed-days lost.1 While the exact economic impact of HAI is difficult to calculate, it is clearly significant, not to mention the emotional and psychological cost to the patients and their families. Patients in ICUs are particularly susceptible to adverse affects from HAI;1 they are even at risk of infections from organisms such as Aspergillus, which is a common fungus that poses low risk to healthy people, but can prove fatal for immuno-compromised patients.2

Impact of building design