Circular vs. Traditional Patient Care Units

[abbaking]

Hello all! I am an RN on a circular patient care unit (20 beds) and I love the design of this type of unit. After having worked on the traditional corridor patient units for 2 years, I transfered to a round unit. The circular unit has a centralized nurses station with patient rooms on the parameter. Although wonderful for keeping a close eye on all patients, our unit's design does have some drawbacks. First, its very noisy (since everything echos). Secondly, it has very small adjoining bathrooms shared by up to 4 patients. I am in California and there are 3 local hospitals with this design. Are there any other hospitals nationally with the round patient unit design? Just curious.....

[NPinWCH]

I've seen the circular units...which I think I would like better than the corridor unit I work on now, but I've never seen the adjoining bathroom thing. The big trend around here is private rooms. We recently did away with our old 4 bed wards and dropped them down to semi-private 2 bed rooms.

The hospital I saw most recently with the circular hall had mostly private rooms and a few semiprivate rooms, but even the semiprivates had their own commodes...they did share a central shower/sink area though.

[ZippyGBR, BSN, RN]

UK based

most ofthe recent builds (30 years ago up till about 5 years ago) used varieties of the 28 bedded 4*6 + 4 side rooms layout - either the paired 'nucleus' wards or quarter/ semi circular variation

newer builds generally seem to go for no room bigger than 4 beds and upto 50% single rooms - certainly that's the layout our 'new' hospital - which is currenty under construction will be

[sonja77]

i've seen the circular design at a nursing home's alzheimer's unit.i don't remember how the had the bathroom's arranged though; we did tour that unit during nursing school clinicals.