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Physical Design (physical + design)
Selected AbstractsPatient-friendly hospital environments: exploring the patients' perspectiveHEALTH EXPECTATIONS, Issue 1 2004Calbert H. Douglas BSc MSc PhD Abstract Objective, To investigate the perceptions and attitudes of patients to the built environments of NHS Trust hospitals, in order to inform design excellence so as to make future hospitals places and spaces responsive to patient needs. Design, An exploratory study of patients perceptions based on qualitative semi-structured personal interviews. Setting and participants, Fifty one-to-one interviews held with hospital in-patients across the four directorates of surgery, medicine, care of the elderly and maternity at Salford Royal Hospitals NHS Trust, Salford, UK. Results, The research found that there was much similarity in the priorities, issues and concerns raised by patients in each of the four directorates. Patients perceived the built environment of the hospital as a supportive environment. Their accounts in each area pointed to the significance of the factors that immediately impacted on them and their families. Patients identified having a need for personal space, a homely welcoming atmosphere, a supportive environment, good physical design, access to external areas and provision of facilities for recreation and leisure. Responses suggest that patient attitudes and perceptions to the built environment of hospital facilities relates to whether the hospital provides a welcoming homely space for themselves and their visitors that promotes health and wellbeing. Conclusions, The findings have important implications for capital development teams, clinical staff, managers and NHS Estates personnel. Although the study has immediate relevance for Salford Royal Hospitals Trust, findings and recommendations reported provide NHS Estates and other relevant stakeholders with evidence-based knowledge and understanding of patients' perceptions and expectations of and preferences for particular facilities and estates provision in NHS hospitals. [source] Heights of occupied patient beds: a possible risk factor for inpatient fallsJOURNAL OF CLINICAL NURSING, Issue 11 2008Huey-Ming Tzeng PhD Aims., The aim of this study was to ascertain the average height of occupied patient beds in a general medical ward and to investigate the relationship between staff working-height for patient beds, time and whether the patient was on fall precaution. Background., The height of occupied patient beds can be an overlooked contributor to inpatient falls. Better physical design of hospital equipment such as patient beds may reduce patient falls and injuries. Methods., This study took place in an acute medical ward of a Michigan medical center. One researcher collected all the data and used the same metric for all the measurements. Univariate analyses were performed. Results., The average staff working-height measurement taken at the weekend was significantly higher than that taken on weekdays. The average height of patient beds on fall precaution was significantly higher than of those not on fall precaution. Conclusions., A higher patient/nurse ratio at weekends than on weekdays may result in fewer bedside nursing hours and nurses being less conscientious about keeping beds in the low position after treatments. In an effort to prevent high-fall-risk patients from falling, nurses may have consciously or unconsciously kept their beds in higher positions. Relevance to clinical practice., If the patient bed can be manually or automatically adjusted, nurses must lower the height of the bed to the lowest position after completing treatments or tasks. This after-procedure activity should be enforced and monitored regularly as part of a hospital's patient fall prevention programme. Low beds should be used for patients at high risk of falling. Future research should investigate patients' and staff's views on hospital equipment to provide evidence-based information for policy-makers determining the design-regulation standard for hospital bedframes. [source] Modelling the interplay between pest movement and the physical design of trap crop systemsAGRICULTURAL AND FOREST ENTOMOLOGY, Issue 1 2005Salla Hannunen Abstract, 1,The interplay between pest movement and trap crop physical design is modelled in a situation where the pest moves by a random walk with spatially variable mobility. Questions addressed are: (i) how does the proportion of trap crop area of the total field area influence the equilibrium distribution of pests among the crop and the trap crop and (ii) how do crop patch size and shape influence the speed of pest redistribution from the crop to the trap crop. 2,When pest mobility in the trap crop is clearly lower than that in the crop, the pest population in the crop decreases very sharply for small trap crop proportions. When mobility in the trap crop is slightly closer to that in the crop, the pest population in the crop decreases much more gradually with increasing trap crop proportion. Thus finding a trap crop that the pest distinctly prefers over the crop appears to be crucial for developing efficient trap crop systems. 3,The rate of decay in the pest population in the crop increases with increasing perimeter to area ratio of the crop patch. Hence, designing field layouts to increase the perimeter to area ratio of crop patches may be beneficial. [source] EARLY RESIDENT EXPERIENCES AT A NEW MIXED-INCOME DEVELOPMENT IN CHICAGOJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2008MARK L. JOSEPH ABSTRACT:,Mixed-income development is an increasingly popular poverty deconcentration strategy in the United States but there have been few in-depth studies about the experiences of residents once they move in to the new housing developments. This article explores the early experiences of residents of all income levels who have moved into a new mixed-income development on the south side of Chicago. In-depth interviews have been conducted with 46 residents of the development, including 23 former public housing residents. Interviews were also conducted with a comparison group of 69 public housing residents who did not move to the development. I find that public housing movers appear to be a substantially different group than non - movers. I find that overall satisfaction with the new development is quite high among residents of all income levels. Early social relations are limited, particularly across income levels, and there are key barriers to interaction, such as physical design, stigma and assumptions based on class and housing status, and segregated associational structures. [source] Flexibility of Steiner trees in uniform orientation metricsNETWORKS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 3 2005M. Brazil Abstract We present some fundamental flexibility properties for minimum length networks (known as Steiner minimum trees) interconnecting a given set of points in an environment in which edge segments are restricted to , uniformly oriented directions. These networks are referred to as ,-SMTs. They promise to play an increasingly important role in the future of optimal wire routing in VLSI physical design, particularly for the next generation of VLSI circuits. In this article we develop the concept of a flexibility polygon for a ,-SMT, which is a region representing the union of all ,-SMTs with the same topology on a given set of points. We show that this polygon can be constructed, for a given point set and given topology, in linear time. We discuss some of the future applications of this polygon, which can be thought of as a geometric representation of the amount of flexibility inherent in a given ,-SMT. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 46(3), 142,153 2005 [source] | ||||||||||