Operating rooms are definitely workplaces—ones where many of us have had occasion to hope that those working there perform to their full potential.
A new article in The New York Times reviews important work being done to develop the operating rooms of the future. The processes outlined in the article are a useful review of ideas that can also lead to successful (however you’d like to define “successful”) workplace design, and this article may even be usefully distributed to office design clients—sometimes the value of a set of actions becomes clearer to users when they are discussed in a context apart from their own.
The article in question is by Ellen Rosen (“Operating Rooms Go Under the Knife,” and was published on May 5, 2021.
Rosen covers many important topics, such as how designers are dealing with operating room clutter and uncertainty related to technologies that will need to be incorporated into these spaces in the future. Rosen found that modularity and flexibility can make future positive operating experiences more likely. Effective layouts, ones that support medical care, are also discussed. Productively utilizing all of the areas in an operating room, even the ceilings, to effectively fulfill the design brief, is discussed.
Some issues that pose challenges in operating rooms also need to be carefully managed in offices. These include lighting and noise. Discussions of lighting and noise in the Rosen article makes extensions from operating room design practices to office design even more logical.
Some of the most interesting sections of the article cover developing simulations of future operating rooms and having future users spend time in these spaces, walking through likely activities, before designs are finalized. The workplace analogies are direct.
Rosen reports, for example, that “Hospital construction—whether for new buildings or renovated pre-existing spaces, takes years, from inception to opening and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Before the spaces are put into use, all the staff—from surgeons to the orderlies—need to practice in the new configuration. Dress rehearsals are common, in spaces like warehouses or even parking lots that are mocked up with cardboard walls to resemble the finished surgical suite. A run-through can be elaborate, bringing together surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses. . . . Evaluating the finished space before the first patient arrives can also help the medical staff make important choices.” These choices link back to effectively serving patient needs in the most probable scenarios, just as workplace design needs to tie to optimized workplace performance in realistic situations.
Operating rooms are complex workplaces where lives depend on high performing medical professionals. In most workplaces, human lives do not depend on the effectiveness of the design, but worker wellbeing and performance certainly do. Even though there are key differences between operating rooms and office spaces, designing them using the same sorts of processes makes positive workplace experiences more likely.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.