Room size considerations for behavioral health outpatient facilities

Room Size Matters in Behavioral Health Outpatient Facilities

The following proposal highlights the considerations that must be satisfied in planning the size of rooms to serve behavioral health situations in an outpatient environment. The housing facilities contribute a great deal to the smooth recovery of patients in a hospital and healthcare nursing homes alike. In outpatient healthcare services, the room size for consultation and residential should meet certain standards. This proposal focuses on the space planning criteria that would help to develop an environment that suits the goal of every behavioral health environment.

Components of a research study

a) The comfort of the patient: The nature of rooms that will host the clients should not come out in a way that makes the clients uncomfortable. The influence of the size of rooms on the behavioral health of a child patient is not the same as that of an adult patient. The space that a recovering child needs will influence their psychological aspect of health and coping. The fact that medical hospitals differ significantly from behavioral healthcare facilities a great deal means that there will be a departure in design features (Devlin, 2015). The need for more natural light in the environment means that the size of the room windows will be larger than for a medical hospital. Besides, there is little need for privacy, and that will mean little or no partitioning in a room.

b) Safety concept in the room: The safety of clients in a behavioral health facility is a critical factor that influences the size of the room. A room should allow clients to move in freely within the same room without feeling any difficulty. In the case of a fire incident, the size of the room should not expose the client to more danger by block access to safe areas within the organization's premises.

c) The number of patients: the minimum and a maximum number of patients that are expected to occupy a given facility matters a great deal in determining the size and designing of the room. If there are plans to increase the number of clients at a future date, it becomes necessary to include that consideration in design factors. The research will focus on the most important factors that will influence the size of the room for posterity reasons.

d) Target groups: The distribution of health challenges is not predictable and therefore, the size of a behavioral health facility should not be specific in design as that can lock other clients unnecessarily.

Strengths

1. The strength of this study the real time situations in already established health facilities are used to inform the design and all the features of the rooms. This approach has the advantage of ensuring that the missing features in previous healthcare facilities are incorporated in this facility. For example, a facility that only targeted children with mental and learning challenges should not have the trouble of having to be relocated to areas where their needs are accommodated.

2. The other strength of this research is that it relies on previous improvements in the field of behavioral health science to inform its decisions. For example, the balance between individual patient privacy and the safety associated with clients in the same room. This feature is very important in enabling the service providers to determine the readiness of a client to reunite with family members (Bland, & Copeland, 2009). For example, if a client has shown the ability to be aware of the surrounding environment and can coexist well with others in the same room, then it is a good sign of recovery. This feature of this research is very crucial in ensuring that a client is leaving the facility to feel isolated or uneasy in the new destination.

Weaknesses

1. The major weaknesses of this study are the fact that it does not establish the reason for variations in environments for military and normal citizens. In a military situation, some of the space requirements that are necessary for an ordinary person are not prioritized, and therefore, privacy is limited. An ordinary client and a military client have different backgrounds, and the contributions of those aspects in their recovery could override the influence of space factor in the health care homes. The fact that the research does not consider other peripheral factors that can combine with space factor to bring an enabling environment makes the study limited and difficult to implement.

2. The space requirement for clients with mental challenges varies from those for patients with terminal illness. This aspect makes it necessary for the study to focus on a specific health situation as opposed to a general health situation. The consultation rooms for the two cases vary and considerations in either cases must be unique. A client who understands herself as they recover is much different from a patient who is mentally unstable throughout the health care sessions.

Future research needs

Future research should focus on a pattern in client health problem that will enable behavioral healthcare organizations to allocate space resource in a discrete way. This area will ensure that the dominant health care issue among the clients gets sufficient space allocation Devlin, 2015). However, this information should not be looked at in isolation instead other factors that are influential in different environments should be considered for concrete findings.

The other area of future study is the effect and opinions of friends and family in designing and allocating the size of rooms. There is some historical information that family knows about their client in a healthcare institution. This information can be modeled to establish a pattern that is consistent and that can help in informing further design work. A client who suffers from sleepwalking when in the state of unstable health would be a consideration for a more spacious room.