This research investigated medical/surgical (Med/Surg) patient room design to accommodate the needs of hospital staff, while at the same time accommodating the needs of patients and their visitors.
Designing hospital patient rooms that provide a comfortable healing experience for patients, while at the same time meeting the needs of the hospital staff, is a challenging process. Prior research has shown that many hospital patient room designs adversely affect the ability of hospital staff to perform their tasks effectively, efficiently, and safely.
Twenty-seven design sessions were conducted in which 104 participants, representing 24 different occupations, worked in small mixed occupational groups to design an ideal single patient Med/Surg patient room to fit their collective needs using a full-scale mock-up. During analysis, the investigators reduced the resulting 27 room designs to 5 hybrid designs that were sequentially reviewed by patients and visitors and by staff to address design conflicts.
This design process identified 51 desirable room design features that were incorporated into 66 evidence-based design guidelines for the different areas within the Med/Surg patient room including the entry way (16 guidelines), the patient clinical area (22 guidelines), the bathroom (17 guidelines), the family area (8 guidelines), and storage areas for patients and their visitors (3 guidelines).
The guidelines developed through this study identified many opportunities for improving the design of hospital Med/Surg rooms to allow staff to be more effective, efficient, and safer, while at the same time addressing the design needs of patients and their visitors.

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This article describes the processes used by an infection prevention and control team to identify a commode chair that would meet the needs of patients in an acute teaching hospital, and could be easily cleaned and disinfected. Some of the strategies used to ensure the commode was fit for purpose could be applied when searching for other reusable equipment for patient use.

Probably no condition produces such an emotive reaction on the part of both patient and care-giver as that of incontinence. It has profound implications psychosocially to both parties, and is often erroneously viewed as an inevitable corollary of the ageing process, being one of the most damning hallmarks of decline, and a potent cause of rejection. This article suggests practical ways in which incontinence can be coped with at home.

For years patients hospitalized with viral hepatitis have been placed in two categories of isolation--enteric precautions and blood precautions. This strategy was based on the inability to differentiate between hepatitis A and B and on the assumption that feces and blood from patients with either type might be infective. It is now known that patients with hepatitis A do not pose a problem of disease transmission through direct contact with blood, and although blood of patients with hepatitis B may be infective, the virus is not transmitted via feces. The enteric route is the principal mode of transmission for hepatitis A, but maximal levels of hepatitis A virus excretion occur before the onset of jaundice. Non-A, non-B hepatitis is similar epidemiologically to hepatitis B. Thus, the major thrust for caring for patients hospitalized with viral hepatitis is toward blood precautions; the same precautions used when handling feces, urine, and excretions from all other hospitalized patients are appropriate for patients admitted with a diagnosis of hepatitis A.