If you ask Scott Reeves, operating rooms resemble an
airplane cockpit. There is sophisticated equipment, tight spaces, blinking
lights and a cacophony of sound.
اضافة اعلان
On top of that, “they’re often cluttered, people can trip,
surgeons and nurses can stick themselves with needles, and side infections from
dust and other contaminations are a growing problem,” said Reeves, chair of the
department of anesthesia and perioperative medicine at the
Medical University of South Carolina.
When he became involved with the design of the operating
rooms at the
R. Keith Summey Medical Pavilion, part of the children’s hospital
of the university, Reeves focused on how to make surgical suites more
accommodating for technology — including imaging machines and robots — as well
as for staff and patients.
Reeves’ actions are part of an increasing recognition that
hospitals are “human centered,” said Anjali Joseph, director of the Center for
Health Facilities Design and Testing at Clemson University, who worked on the
design for the ambulatory center that opened in 2019. “We cannot think of
patient safety without thinking about the health of everyone in the room. They
are interlinked.”
Their goal is to rethink the layout and plan for the future,
and the South Carolina team is not alone. The problem of squeezing people and a
variety of machines — not to mention
robots — into surgical suites designed
decades ago is forcing a change.
From increasing in size to reorienting the layout, hospitals
— especially those that are part of large university medical centers — are
bringing surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses together with architects,
engineers and administrative staff to rethink the modern operating room. But
even older community hospitals, with more limited budgets, are getting
creative, since surgeries are an all-important source of revenue.
While new construction is more straightforward than
retrofitting an older building, not every hospital has the financing or the
space to begin anew. Building a new operating room can cost from $1 million to
$3 million per surgical suite, Reeves said. The cost of a new hospital can
exceed $1 billion.
Configuring new surgical suites in existing buildings
requires creativity, said Joan Saba, a health care architect and partner with
NBBJ, an architecture and design firm.
For example, older operating rooms may have ceiling heights
as low as 10 feet, while 12-16 feet is now considered optimum, in order to
house electronics, cables and ductwork, she said. Some have captured space from
the floor above to gain the extra height. When that is not an option, some
hospitals have repurposed adjoining rooms to house electronics and other
infrastructure.
New equipment and new surgical techniques are largely
driving the redesigns. Those who designed operating rooms even 20 years ago
could not have foreseen the explosion in technology, which often requires more
space.
“Imaging management” is the biggest challenge that operating
rooms have, said Mary Hawn, chair of the department of surgery at Stanford
University, which opened a new hospital in November 2019. (Stanford’s new
children’s hospital opened in 2017.) “Twenty years ago, we would operate on
exactly what we were looking at, possibly magnifying it with loupes,” the
specialized glasses that augment a surgeon’s vision. Now, monitors provide high
definition to guide the surgeon.
In addition, for very complicated surgeries, hospitals hope
to have equipment such as CT scans and other imaging machines in the operating
room. This not only saves time — it lessens the risk of infection.
“Patients need not be closed up, taken out for imaging, see
that you missed something and then bring them back to the operating room and
open them up again,” Saba said.
Read more
Lifestyle
.jpg)
.jpg)
