Home of Healing

I have been in and out of hospitals for a long time.

Now, now, I'm not some sickly child always on the precipice of great illness. Fortunately, the only time I was so very sick was when I was very young. But, both of my parents are medical. My father is a surgeon and my mother a nurse; it was inevitable that I spend time at the hospital, considering that's where my family was for most of their time.

In my time flitting in and out of hospitals, I've seen three distinct groups of people who occupy them. Perhaps there are more, but the people I notice are these: the staff (the doctors, nurses, maintenance workers, and everybody else who are employed to in some way help people heal), the patients (the people who most need the physical healing the building represents), and the visitors (the people who most need the emotional healing the building should provide). At various times I've been a member of each of these groups. But, it's important to keep these three related but ultimately different sets of people in mind, as you design a place to help people come to health.

Quick fact sheet for Shive-Hattery:

• They work in a variety of different fields, mostly concerning non-residential design. For example, one of the men I talked with (I believe his name was Mark Anderson, though now I can't remember for sure) worked almost entirely in health care, designing hospitals and senior care/living and the like. Beyond that, they also do business in buildings for commercial, educational, governmental, and industrial purposes, among other related things.
• Not called "principals" -- Instead, they're just "shareholders." The idea is to promote a more horizontal organizational structure instead of a stricter hierarchical one.
• Midwest-based. Which, since they don't specify Chicago outright, doesn't just mean Chicago. Rather, there are nine offices across four states (Bloomington, Moline, Downers Grove, and Chicago in Illinois, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and West Des Moines in Iowa, Valparaiso in Indiana, and a very small office in Chesterfield, Missouri). The primary of these is in Cedar Rapids, IA.

As you might guess, coming from my background as I did, I was most interested to hear about their work in healthcare. The truth is, I wouldn't expect juggling the needs of three different groups of people to be very easy. You have to keep the doctors and staff happy, because the better the staff can work the better patient outcomes are. You have to keep the patients in good condition, because they are the ones who most need whatever help is available. And, though you may not think about it, you have to keep the visitors happy too, because they're going through very nearly as much as the patients are psychologically.

Let me tell a story, or rather, a collection of related stories, which encompass both my relation to hospitals and these needs in a hospital. When I was very young, not quite age 2, I had cancer. If it means anything to you, it was a neuroblastoma on my left adrenal gland, but the important thing was my family had to go down to St. Louis Children's Hospital to seek treatment. Long story short, things are okay now, but for a while things were hairy and my parents were a wreck emotionally. They like to tell the story of my initial surgery, to cut out the tumor. They sat with me before it began, trying to comfort me (but really trying to comfort each other -- what would a 18 month old baby know about what was going on?). Once the surgery began, though, they were in a fog. They didn't know what to do with themselves, so they wandered down to the cafeteria, and before they knew it the surgery was over and they were being called back up to see me. What's important here is that, while they were waiting, they needed help. They needed something to get their minds off of what was going on, and going to the cafeteria, even just that act of removing themselves from the designated waiting area, gave some comfort. Today, some hospitals have buzzer systems similar to those found waiting in lines at restaurants, so that visitors can wander around without having to sit and wait and think and think about what is happening but still be notified when the surgery is over.

The second story follows the first; even after removing the tumor, more needed to be done to make sure nothing else came back. So, I went under chemotherapy, which meant a lot of large needles had to go into a small child who really did not like the situation. And, it came to be that when the nurse who would begin the process wanted to ask if we were ready, he would stand in the doorway. Every time that happened, I would begin to cry until he either came in and did it or just left; in addition to designing a space for me to be, the way the nurse interacted with us (and specifically myself) had to be designed (insofar as my mom chastised him to either come in or not because she was upset that he was making me cry).

The third thing is pretty different; not even a story really, just some things I remember. My parents both work at Carle here in town, and there's a room in the main hospital (on University) designated for doctors to take downtime in, if they need to. There's a couple of couches, a fridge and some food (whenever I came, mid-morning when my dad did his rounds, typically bagels or breakfast items of some sort), and a giant TV, and on this TV, when not commandeered by the ten-year-old son of a surgeon waiting for his dad to finish his rounds, was typically on something like the Food Network, because when a doctor has time away from their patients, the last thing they want to do is concern themselves with anything more complicated than the zen of cooking. The hospital provides a way for them to destress, so that they can better serve their patients.

A lot of this has little or nothing to do with Shive-Hattery, I'll admit. If you want more info about them, they gave me a nifty little puzzle trinket thing. It's fascinating. But, what interests me is what interested the man I talked to from Shive-Hattery. How do you design a space that meets the needs of all three of these different groups? Many potential answers bear his mark; there are more, and perhaps better. However, it is an interesting problem nonetheless.