Toward a Model of Safety and Care for Trauma Room Design
"Toward a Model of Safety and Care for Trauma Room Design" is a $2.47 m grant project awarded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). It is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Kent State University’s Healthcare Design, Nursing, and Computer Science programs and Cleveland Clinic Akron General. The project aims to help save patients’ lives by improving the design of Level I trauma rooms. Dynamics among people, technology, organization, tasks, and the physical environment of a trauma room will be studied. The project is a five-phase cycle (problem analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation). Goals of the project include developing design strategies to integrate technology and maximize future adaptability, testing proposed design strategies for a trauma room, and developing an evidence-based model for designing trauma rooms that support efficient patient care while maintaining a safe environment. The developed design guide model is expected to contribute to patient safety in trauma rooms by serving as a primary source to direct the design of the next generation of trauma rooms.