Weighing Your Furniture Options

Furniture—like heating and lighting—remains indispensible to delivering quality healthcare. These common objects are expected to support many healthcare tasks, such as providing patients and family members with support from stress and fatigue, enabling caregivers to work safely and effectively as a team, and reflecting a healthcare organization’s vision and brand. Together, it can be quite a tall order.

Healthcare leaders from every type of clinical facility, ranging from ambulatory clinics to long-term care facilities, must purchase and maintain furniture in order to deliver care. Individuals charged with evaluating and recommending furniture purchases may be challenged by the overwhelming number of furniture choices and feature options.

Creation of an EBD furniture checklist
An Evidence-Based Design (EBD) Furniture Checklist (To view the authors' Evidence-Based Design Furniture Checklist and Healthcare Facility Lifecycle Phases, please use the links at the bottom of this page), which follows at the end of this article, was created to provide healthcare leaders and the designers who support them with an evidence-based tool that can assist in making the best furniture investments for the patients and organizations they serve. The one-page checklist is primarily designed to facilitate a consistent approach during furniture product inquiry and evaluation, to enable effective design team and client communication, and to provide an evidence-based framework for comparing products and evaluating the best return on investment.

It may be useful when:

• Evaluating manufacturer product brochures and websites;
• Meeting with manufacturers and furniture dealers to evaluate furniture;
• Working with interior designers to evaluate proposed furniture features, room layout, and product specification;
• Examining and evaluating existing furniture for life expectancy;
• Conducting a return-on-investment analysis;
• Developing contract specifications for furniture purchase or rental; and
• Conducting a postoccupancy evaluation.

The checklist
The EBD Furniture Checklist (Malone, E. B., & Dellinger, B. A. (2011). Furniture Design Features and Healthcare Outcomes. Concord, California: The Center for Health Design) is divided into eight sections that correspond to common EBD goals for which furniture has been shown to play a role. The first three EBD goals pertain to key patient safety concerns that can result in significant patient harm.

The next three goals focus on the use of furniture to provide respite and social support, and to enable safe and effective care delivery. Environmental safety is the seventh goal; and, finally, considerations for making furniture investments are found in the eighth goal. Each goal section includes recommended furniture feature variables based on research, industry standards, and Facility Guideline Institute requirements, the citations for which are found in the references appendix.

A detailed review of the research literature and standards that underpin each furniture feature variable can be found in the white paper “Furniture Design Features and Healthcare Outcomes” on The Center for Health Design’s (CHD) website at www.healthdesign.org/chd/research.