Healthcare Facility Design Utilizing Digital Simulation and Evidence Based Method

Abstract

Abstract

This research aims assessing the achievement of preset objectives of Emergency Departments (EDs) in early design phase according to the change of topological aspect, which have an impact on the performance of medical staff and satisfaction of patients and their families. To justify design objectives of ED, Evidence-Based Design (EBD) at EDs was taken in consideration. EBD is a way of design through research, where data is gathered through an accumulative collection of solutions from existing hospitals to improve design decisions. consequently, the emergency service outcomes. In order to benefit from these solutions in design phase, it is needed to quantitatively understand the impact of ED configuration-related solutions on various human behaviors. Wherefore Space Syntax techniques are utilized to quantitatively represent the strength of connections between spaces that are arranged to each other in a given configuration with respect to human behavior. Thus, utilizing Space Syntax analysis provides measures that allows predicting how far EDs design strategies/solutions could be attained from a very early stage, and which ED topology meets most of these strategies. Correspondingly, when it comes to critical departments such as Emergency Departments, it is important to study the effectiveness of Space Syntax techniques with respect to ED design strategies that were extracted from EBD in decision-making at the design phase. A comparison between syntactical measures obtained from analyzing different ED topologies in order to deduce the effect of spatial configuration in wayfinding, medical surveillance, physicians’ accessibility, and privacy as strategies needed to be achieved in ED.