There isn’t a market that Patterson Pope doesn’t touch, but right now we are all about healthcare in Columbus, OH. I’m not exaggerating when I say every healthcare system in this town is doing some major expansion or renovation to their facility. As a result, one of the big topics of conversation with our clients is around nursing stations.
Just like anything else, there are different schools of thought and trends around nursing stations. The biggest decision: centralized or decentralized. I had a great conversation with an architect this week, Brian Addis, whose firm specializes in healthcare. In his opinion, there are pros and cons to both – mainly around level of service and level of care.
Level of service measures how accessible a nurse is to a patient. It is about proximity to the patient. So by default, decentralized nursing stations (one to every four rooms, for example) increases the level of service a nurse can provide. Level of care measures how knowledgeable the nurse is about his (or her) job. Nurses share information. If they are clustered together in a centralized nursing station, they feed off of each other, talk about their patients and information is passed down from the experienced to the inexperienced.
So, there are clear advantages to both centralized and decentralized nursing stations. The question is: how do you find this balance?
For more information on nursing station trends in healthcare visit the healthcaresales101.com article here.