Produced by fuelfor, a design consultancy firm, the report, entitled: ‘Hospitable Hospice: Redesigning care for tomorrow’, offers seven universal concepts and 24 design principles to improve end of life care in Singapore.
ehospice had the opportunity to interview Mr Lee Poh Wah, CEO of the Lien Foundation and the person responsible for producing the report, at the Asia Pacific Hospice Conference in Bangkok.
According to Mr Lee, hospices suffer a poor image in society that does not reflect the very important work that they do. He said: “Hospices deserve better understanding from society and fresh insights to empower them for the future.”
The project brought together aspects of health economics, hospice care provision and design principles to produce a report identifying what could be done to improve the in-patient hospice experience.
The report was disseminated in the form of a full-colour book containing a mix of evocative photographs, explanatory infographics and detailed yet accessible text which came together to communicate the consultants’ vision for the hospitable hospices of the future.
Commenting on the report, Mr Lee said: “I do believe that designers have the power to influence consumption and the construction of meaning, in this case at the end of life itself. So good design to me is not just about creating useful objects and experiences. Good design seeks to create interaction and meaning… It’s about how do you not just create a nice space, or a peaceful environment that is like a beautiful oasis, calming and comforting. You want to have meaningful interactions and communications between the staff and also the patients and family members themselves.”
The idea that small changes can be made to enhance the potential of hospices led the Lien Foundation to commission this report. Me Lee noted: “We have wonderful staff, professionals delivering quality palliative care, but the whole environment, how is it designed- what you see, what you smell, what you hear… the walk through- it does have an impact in terms of how we can make it better for the patients, the family members and also for the staff. So it is with this backdrop that we decided to commission feulfor to produce this report.”
David Praill, chief executive of Help the Hospices in the UK, highly recommended the report as an excellent resource for any hospice to use. He said: “This is a most remarkable, thought provoking and helpful publication. Congratulations to the Lien foundation for having the vision to produce this and to everyone who was involved in its production. I would consider ‘Hospitable Hospice’ to be essential reading material for anyone leading a hospice into the future.”
Commissioned in the middle of a building boom in Singapore, this report comes at an opportune time for hospices in the city-state. Mr Lee reflected on the impact that this would have on people needing palliative care, as the healthcare sector rushed to keep up: He said: “The number of nursing home beds is going to increase by 70% by 2020, the number of senior care centres is going to more than double by 2016… Our thinking is that in this frantic and hurried quest to add hospice capacity and to meet our key performance indicators, it is very, very important for us to aspire to a level of service and care that is good enough for our mothers, for our fathers, for ourselves. We need have future-enabled hospices that you or I don’t mind checking into if the time comes.”
Asked whether this report would be relevant only to organizations with money to spend, Mr Lee told ehospice: “We always thought that this would be more relevant for developed countries, but I do think again that there are some universal design principles that can be applicable in any hospice context, all the ideas, even how you treat the patient, give respect and dignity, these can be achieved anywhere… A lot of these ideas of service concepts can be brought to fruition without a lot of money or funding to get it started.”
The Lien Foundation has made the report freely available. Mr Lee said: “To me this is really about providing a guiding force in the development of new spaces, new services and systems, not just for hospices but also for elder care. So it can become a manual when you talk to the architect, to say to them: ‘This is what I mean.’”
The report, Hospitable Hospice: Redesigning Care for Tomorrow, can be accessed online. Users can download the report, or browse a user-friendly interactive e-book version.
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