Nurses as Leaders in Healthcare Design

Given the rapidly growing recognition of the value of nurses in the built healthcare environment, it’s critical that the industry properly prepare nurses at every level for effective participation for their role in designing healthcare facilities. The clinical perspective of astute caregivers is proving to be exceptionally beneficial with regard to patient safety, improved workflow, patient outcome and cost reduction. However, for these benefits to be fully realized, nurses must be adequately equipped for interaction with the design and construction community.

This presentation will instruct participants in how to structure nursing leadership teams for involvement in a design/build project – whether that project is a patient care unit remodel or a complete facility replacement.  As health systems continue to merge, it is important to develop consistency and standards for nurse involvement in design across the larger organizational structure. Creating this structure with vision from the top leadership can ensure that the processes and vision is carried out throughout the entire system. Once a health system has experienced a design and construction project that successfully applied nursing leadership in the design process, the organization will reap rewards from by early adoption and ownership of the changes facilitated by the design and by the dissemination of the knowledge and competencies shared at all levels of the nursing hierarchy. A healthcare system will enjoy a positive return on investment with an informed nurse leadership team structure deploying the planning, design, and change model for subsequent design and construction projects, and by encouraging experienced nurse leaders to serve as champion trainers for additional teams, as dictated by design and construction schedules. The importance of clinical and historical information in decision making is one of the top reasons for including knowledgeable nurse leaders in healthcare design. Much time is wasted revisiting decisions that have already been vetted and could be applied to other projects. Addiitonally, nurse leaders will learn to apply the same design problem solving skills to innovation projects other than facility design.

Also covered in this presentation will be an identification of the tools and resources available to nurse leaders for planning and design for construction projects. To prove their worth, nurses must be able to dialogue with architects, engineers and contractors in an informed manner to answer their questions, to ask questions of their own, or to challenge design decisions that may negatively affect patient care outcomes (visibility of the patient leading to patient falls), work flow processes, or communication among care providers. Nurse leaders must understand the design process, know how to promote evidence-based design, and identify the most effective times/phases in design and construction timetable to give input. In this presentation, nurse leaders will learn about the the flow and process of design, and how design evolves over the course of a project. Participates will be introduced to a working design and construction vocabulary that is critical for nurses to effectively communicate and advocate for patient care delivery and workflow. Facility attributes that promote patient and provider safety and efficiency in care delivery will be discussed. 

Presenters will describe a number of case studies demonstrating nurse leadership models resulting in successful construction projects. Evidence-based design applies as much to healthcare construction as it does to the practice of nursing, and this presentation incorporates best practices and real world evidence of innovations in nursing leadership that make healthcare design and construction more effective in safe, quality care in delivery systems.

The involvement of nurse leaders in design and construction is a cornerstone of our industry work to support the design and implementation of care delivery models. Nurse leaders have achieved enormous success in recent years to secure seats at the healthcare design table; the next step is to fully develop the design competencies of nurse leaders and clinical nurses sitting in those seats, and to ensure they are adequately prepared to provide meaningful, timely, and informed input in the design process.