Medical Education Programs Produce a New Generation of Healthcare Professionals
Richard Pizzi, CEO| May 2023
According to the American Hospital Association, hospitals have seen a decrease of nearly 105,000 employees since February 2020*. This shortage has led to increased labor costs, staff burnout, delayed patient care and ultimately financial loss to healthcare systems. In response, many organizations are proactively investing in medical education programs to support a new generation of healthcare professionals.
With rising construction costs and, potentially limited capital, organizations can consider strategies to create highly effective medical education (MedEd) spaces in a smaller footprint than their predecessors. To get the most out of these MedEd spaces, programming and design should take the following into consideration:
Location
Like real estate, optimum location promotes high utilization. Your center will benefit from being in close proximity to all potential learners.
Organizational Layout
An effective space plan layout promotes team and cross-room simulation. Spaces that support the full continuum of care and the wide range of trainers including human patient simulators, standardized patients (actors), and advancing technologies, including virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality. The space plan layout must also consider operations and logistics (on stage / off stage), critical adjacencies, entrances, and circulation patterns for visitors, learners, staff, supplies, and standardized patients.
Multi-purpose / Flexible Space
Your space program should embody multi-functional, flexible labs and support spaces that promote a variety of healthcare environments including individual skills training, multidisciplinary team learning, and multi-room scenarios to simulate real world settings.
Pictured below: Boston Children’s Hospital, Pediatric Simulation Center – As is common with hospital-based simulation centers Boston Children’s Hospital was faced with limited available space. Resulting in a new Simulation Center that emphasizes flexible, multi-purpose spaces, in which each space supports two to three functions.
About the Simulation / Medical Education Team
Aided by designing over 4 million square of real healthcare space over the past decade, Lavallee Brensinger Architects is recognized as a leader in the programming and design of state-of-the-art medical education simulation and instructional spaces for individual training and interdisciplinary teams. These projects have included academic institutions as well as Hospital-based programs, with active projects at St. Anslem College, University of Massachusetts Nursing School in Amherst, the University of New Haven, and Springfield Technical Community College.
*Hughes, S. (2022, March 1). AHA letter re: Challenges facing america’s health care workforce as the U.S. enters third year of covid-19 pandemic: AHA. American Hospital Association. Retrieved December 7, 2022, from https://www.aha.org/lettercomment/2022-03-01-aha-provides-information-congress-re-challenges-facing-americas-health