Impact of Physical Design Options on Nurse Walking Time in Inpatient Units

Impact of Physical Design Options on Nurse Walking Time in Inpatient Units is a webinar presentation that presents study findings about frequent nursing tasks and the impact of facility design on walking time for nurses. 

Excessive walking by nurses has been widely reported. While operational interventions abound, demonstrated architectural solutions are few, owing to complex interactions between operational and design factors that influence actual walking. Recent time-motion studies are beginning to capture values of influential variables, such as trip frequencies to various destinations on a unit.

As part of a study to develop and validate a nurse walking prediction measure, HKS researchers collected task frequency data from 812 medical-surgical and ICU nurses, from 46 states, through a nation-wide stratified random sampling. Analyses show that nurse walking time saving between different independent options pertaining to documentation, medication, telephone, and supplies range between 22 to 34 minutes each, per nurse, per a 12-hour shift. Combined, a point of care model, compared to a fully centralized model, results in a walking distance reduction of 68%. That translates to 154 minutes of walking time per nurse in a single shift, or 39 days reduction in time wastage per nurse, per year, for day shift alone. This webinar will present key findings from the data analysis. Elements of architectural design that could bear maximum impact on walking will be explored.

Webinar Learning Objectives

• Identify the most frequently conducted set of nursing tasks in medical-surgical and ICU settings
  
  
• Learn regarding physical design attributes that could impact task-related walking
  
  
• Explore how a performance-based approach can be used to optimize nurse walking distance

About the Speakers:


Debajyoti Pati, PhD FIIA LEED © AP
Vice President
Director of Research
HKS, INC.

Debajyoti Pati is vice president and director of research at HKS, Inc. He holds a PhD in architecture from Georgia Institute of Technology and has over 21 years experience in architectural research, practice, and education. He has worked on numerous funded studies and has presented and published widely on healthcare environment research. He is a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Architects, member of the Research Coalition of the Center for Health Design, and chairs the EBD research group at the Health Environments Research Summit. In 2009 he was voted among the most influential people in healthcare design, and received the Best International Research Project award from the International Academy for Design & Health.

Tom E. Harvey
Director of Clinical Solutions & Research
Healthcare Operations and Planning Group
HKS, INC.

Tom E. Harvey is the director of Clinical Solutions & Research and Healthcare Operations and Planning Group at HKS and a Professor at UT Arlington. He has over 31 years of experience in planning, programming, feasibility studies, facility design, and project management for healthcare clients. Tom has presented in numerous forums and has contributed numerous book chapters on healthcare including Building Type Basics for Healthcare Facilities, and Encyclopedia of Architecture: Design, Engineering & Construction, Volume 2.