Step inside the Swiss lab where pretend patients find real solutions to hospital design
At Switzerland’s Centre for Design and Health in Nidau, doctors and architects role-play hospital scenarios using full-scale simulations - catching costly design mistakes and creating patient-focused spaces before construction begins.
Every few months in Nidau, a village in central Switzerland, people get together
to play doctors and nurses. They gather in a facility the size of a car park, don lab coats and step into an imaginary ward with lightweight walls. A volunteer is chosen to play the patient, another the anaesthetist. “So, you’re here for your shoulder operation?” says someone who
is playing the receptionist.
These make-believe sessions are orchestrated by the very real Swiss Center for Design and Health (SCDH), a public-private partnership that is using design to help healthcare spaces become more efficient and human-centred. The SCDH enables architects and developers to physically try new hospital spaces before they are built, using a purpose-made “extended-reality simulation space” that projects the architect’s floor plan at a 1:1 scale. The SCDH then invites real doctors, surgeons and healthcare teams into this facsimile to role-play a day on the ward.
“It’s stress-testing the hospital, avoiding errors in the building,” says SCDH managing director Stefan Sulzer, who co-created the centre. “It soon becomes obvious what works and what doesn’t.” For instance, in a recent simulation, an architect discovered that a standard hospital bed wouldn’t fit down the corridor of an existing floor plan. Catching such problems early, says Sulzer, can save patients down the line.
In the public simulation that Monocle attends, the scenario follows a 75-year-old in a wheelchair (actually a sprightly woman in her mid-thirties) on her journey to the operating theatre. The design faults are soon apparent: the reception-desk counter is too high. “Immediately you have a hierarchy,” says Minou Afzali, the head of research at SCDH. “Also, there are patients within earshot in the waiting room. They can hear everything that’s being said.”
SCDH is also helping companies to innovate in healthcare design, from electric “skylights” offering a sense of daylight to bowls that facilitate one-handed eating. At the core of the centre’s thinking is bringing in the end-user earlier. “A hospital can look fantastic,” says Sulzer. “But let’s test it and ensure that it actually works.”
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