Archive | 2019
Patient-Centered Care and the Design of a Psychiatric Care Facility
Abstract
This shift to a patient-centered care paradigm has implications not only for how hospitals provide care but also for how they are experienced and perceived by patients and communities more broadly. It confronts the traditional and outdated perceptions of hospitals as sites of authority and manifestations of power relations, a phenomenon prevalent in psychiatric facilities in particular (Foucault 1982, p. 790). In the past power has been realized through structures of authority, hierarchy and expertise, the allocation of treatment modalities, and inclusion or exclusion of patient families and carers from the care process through simple things such as visitation access or participating in treatment decisions. Contemporary models of health care have begun to challenge this perception and enactment of power that has been prevalent in the past. The evolution to new models of care within medical contexts, and particularly nursing (Curtis et al. 2013, and Wagner 2010), marks a shift from power realized through a treatment relationship, to one of patient care and the provision of health services. In this chapter we reflect on what this transition from treatment to care means for designers and their approaches to the design of contemporary psychiatric care facilities through a focus on the design approaches to one facility in particular.