Thesis Update

By Sean Hartman

Well after a rough couple of weeks it's time to get back into the groove of things. My thesis is coming along pretty well. I have a well established program and I am working towards a layout of the facility. I didn't realize there is so much stuff to consider when designing an Emergency Department or trying to correct the flow/problems where my project is located. So far my project has had a lot more research and understanding how things flow and operate so I better understand how things function. One of the things I am trying to accomplish with the redesign of the Carbondale Memorial Hospital is that I am trying to look at it from a patients stand point and how would someone get there and feel in the space in an emergency. I have been to several hospitals and tried to see how they functioned from the one here in town. There is an obvious difference in layout and flow from older hospitals to newer hospital due floor plans being changed to better improve the emergency departments.

With all the research I have done and looked at books emergency departments are a crazy thing to design. You have to take a functionality side approach to designing them to see what will work and what won't. The layout and design of them are very strict and sometimes leaves little to no room for design. There are a couple of areas you can have fun designing from what I have gathered and that is the lobby, and registration area. You can put a little more design into them but other than that it pretty much is a nightmare to get things in the right location. A big thing with designing a facility of this type is the flow has to work almost flawlessly or it could hinder on the staffs performance inside the department. Also the size of the department is another tricky design issue. You can't just say I am going to design this massive new emergency department wing for a hospital there are certain things that control that from happening. One governing thing that helps with this is the annual patient visits per year.

With research continuing and starting to develop a floor plan things are starting to move in a positive direction again. I hope to have my midterm review on my project here this week or next week so that I can get feedback from my committee. There were some circumstances that prevented me from presenting with the rest of my class. I have played catch up and I finally feel that I have a grasp on things again. With being gone for a week and a half to come back for about a week then be on spring break has thrown me for a loop. Spring break was put to good use to catch up on things/projects in other classes so that I wouldn't have to worry about it or have them hinder my thesis work. It's just a matter of getting back into the groove and getting motivated to do things once again. Hopefully revisiting everything and the emergency room will get me going again. Wish me luck on the road ahead.