Health care spaces and structures influence how efficiently and effectively health interventions work and for whom. Roles of clinical, common, and restricted areas in health care operations should be collectively and inclusively crafted to balance employee, patient, and visitor needs for safety, comfort, collegiality, and good outcomes. Evidence-based design has evolved to guide architecture, engineering, building construction, and service delivery. What is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt when we inhabit health care spaces is neither clinically, ethically, nor aesthetically neutral. Peace, calm, rest, and good care can facilitate healing. This theme issue considers evidence-based design ideas in health care that motivate this purpose.
We invite wide-ranging manuscripts for consideration in this December 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® on evidence-based design. For example, the following investigations are examples of welcome contributions: good versus ill design features of health care structures and spaces (eg, clean and uncluttered versus excessively noisy and illuminated), advocacy groups influence in design determinations (eg, Komenization or pinkification of breast imagining locales), patterns of privilege in health care design (eg, “biocontainment” units and “birthing suites”), roles played by design plans in states’ Certificate of Need processes, and health care structures and spaces as sets in which clinicians and staff are actors who accept or resist their roles in such set designs.
Manuscript submission deadline has passed.
The AMA Journal of Ethics® invites original, English-language contributions for peer review consideration on the upcoming themes.