Research Article

Exploring the spatial arrangement of patient rooms for minimum nurse travel in hospital nursing units in Korea

  • Jisun Lee 1,2 ,
  • Hyunsoo Lee , 1 ,
  • Mardelle McCuskey Shepley 2
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  • 1. Department of Interior Architecture and Built Environment, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea
  • 2. Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

Received date: 22 Mar 2020

Revised date: 15 Jun 2020

Accepted date: 16 Jun 2020

Published date: 15 Dec 2020

Copyright

2020 2020 Higher Education Press Limited Company. Publishing Services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Abstract

With increasing demands on medical care services, one of the trends is the mixed patient room arrangement of single/double-bed and multi-bed rooms in a nursing unit on the same floor. This influences nurse-to-patient assignment and often causes an unbalanced workload and longer travel distances for nurses. The objective of this study was to investigate how floor configuration and room density influence nurse travel in the hospital’s medical surgical units in Korea. This study presented a novel approach to measure nurse travel distances in eight existing nursing units. The agent-based simulation was conducted to model nurses’ walking trails, and the distance of one nurse travel to assigned patient rooms was measured for each nurse. With revisions in the spatial arrangement of patient rooms, locating multibed rooms near the nurse station, symmetric room layout centering the nurse station, and planning both single/double-bed and multi-bed rooms on one side of corridors, nurse travel distance decreased more than 15%. This study contributed to the knowledge of agent-based simulation as an evaluation framework for spatial analysis. Apart from application to Korea, these results are particularly of interest in countries where private patient rooms are not commonly economically feasible.

Cite this article

Jisun Lee , Hyunsoo Lee , Mardelle McCuskey Shepley . Exploring the spatial arrangement of patient rooms for minimum nurse travel in hospital nursing units in Korea[J]. Frontiers of Architectural Research, 2020 , 9(4) : 711 -725 . DOI: 10.1016/j.foar.2020.06.003

Outlines

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