The Patient Room: what is the ideal solution? - Cornell University

Single Patient Room and Layout Complications
Building a hospital with a majority of single-patient rooms changes the layout of the hospital floor. Typically, this
construction lengthens the corridors of hospital wards and therefore increases walking distances for staff
members-- primarily the nursing staff. This in turn could result in nurse fatigue and frustration, and therefore
lower quality of patient care.
A tendency for hospitals, when building 100% single -
patient rooms, is to align each room one after the other,
creating long corridors for the nurses to travel. This
alignment is often necessary to ensure that each private
room maintains its privacy and that each one’s layout is
identical to the next (the “handedness” of the room). The
identical nature of each room allows for greater staff
efficiency and safety because all of the supplies and
facilities kept within the room can be found quickly and
easily. The long corridors that are oftentimes inevitable,
however, increase the distances traveled by nurses
daily, which can ultimately lead to nurse fatigue given
their long hours. According to John Reiling, President
and CEO of Synergy Health and St. Joseph’s Hospital,
“Fatigue has been identified as a contributing factor to
human error. While the effects of fatigue on patient
safety is not known, fatigue has been found to have a
negative impact on alertness, mood, and
psychomotor and cognitive performance, which can
have an impact on patient safety” ( Hughes, 2008). 40