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The healthcare facility design process provides a singular opportunity for designing spaces that promote safe and high-quality care. Virtual and physical full-scale models of spaces, called mock-ups, are increasingly being employed by healthcare architecture firms and health systems while planning for new or remodeled patient care areas. Simulating typical and high risk clinical scenarios in these mock-ups and then evaluating the performance of these spaces in relation to key design objectives, offers huge benefits and cost savings to healthcare teams by helping identify design challenges before the building is constructed. In addition to cost savings, these simulation-based evaluations are also effective in engaging multidisciplinary clinical stakeholders and obtaining staff buy-in for major design and operational changes.

Healthcare organizations are faced with the challenge of renovating existing infrastructure or building new facilities to enable the inclusion of computer workstations and address growing technological demands. The majority of existing ergonomic tools for evaluating computer workstations primarily focus on the interface between the care provider and the computer. This paper describes the development and application of an expanded ergonomic evaluation framework that focuses on the work system versus the workstation. The tool was tested and refined through visits to five facilities where the ergonomic evaluation tool was used to assess five preoperative and seven postoperative rooms/bays in surgical suites with varying spatial configurations and types of workstations. The comparative evaluation showed that all workstations met most of the basic checklist requirements, but there were significant differences related to the location of the workstation and adjacencies to other zones in how effectively the workstations were integrated into the space.