How To Decorate A Private Medical Facility
If you’re working in the healthcare industry, you should be aware – and perhaps you are already – that it’s a massive sector, and it’s growing quickly. In fact, it’s one of the fastest-growing industries of all when you take everything into account. This means that more and more clinics and other private medical facilities are opening, and if this is something you are keen to do with your medical qualifications and experience, then it’s certainly a good path to go down.
Yet although this is a good idea, and although it could be extremely successful, the very fact that there are lots of medical facilities being opened all the time since the sector is growing means that you could get lost in the crowd, no matter how good you are at what you do. Here are some useful tips on how to decorate your private medical facility to ensure that patients are comfortable, happy and that they want to tell others how great your clinic is. Stand out from the crowd with your décor, and you can soon prove what excellent medical skills you have. Read on to find out more.
Make It Easy To Navigate Through
The last thing you want to happen is that your patients come to you for help and then become stressed out and anxious because your facility is confusing and difficult to navigate around. You earned your online post-master’s certificates in nursing to help people, not to make their condition worse, so by ensuring your private medical facility is laid out in a helpful, easy-to-navigate way is an important factor.
To begin with, if you can’t actually change the layout of your clinic because of budget or time constraints, or perhaps because building codes won’t allow you to, you must make sure there is enough signage so that no one is going to get lost. For example, you can place signs on the wall pointing to various different areas such as the exit, reception, and the doctor’s offices. You can also utilize the floor and walls; have different colored lines painted that people can follow – each color should take them to a different area, making it virtually impossible for them to get lost. Equally, you can include maps or even self-service kiosks with information on computer screens within them.
If the layout of the building you have bought is confusing and you can, then it may be wise to move walls and open up corridors to ensure that there are no dead ends and that all the space is used in the best way possible to help your patients and not make them feel as though they’ve made a mistake booking an appointment with you. Remember, with private medical clinics, word of mouth is an essential part of your marketing; the better you can make your facility, the more people will recommend it, and the more work you’ll have.
Create A Welcoming Ambiance
If a patient steps through the front door of your clinic and immediately feels comfortable, perhaps even ‘at at home’, they are going to be much more relaxed and happier to be there. Not only will this help you when it comes to word-of-mouth recommendations, as mentioned above, but it will also ensure your patients can be treated properly. An overly stressed or anxious patient may have their actual symptoms masked by this anxiety, and therefore it can be much harder to diagnose them and treat them properly. Their blood pressure will be higher; for example, their heart rate will be more rapid, and they will generally be a lot tenser. If they are happy in their surroundings because you have created a welcoming ambiance right from the start, they will be easier to work on and with.
There are many different ways to ensure you have a welcoming atmosphere in your clinic, and the one or ones you choose will, to some extent at least, depend on your own preferences and the types of patients you treat. For example, if you are ostensibly a children’s clinic, the design is likely to be quite different from a maternity clinic, which might differ from a senior care center. Take your patients into account when you think of the décor that will make them most comfortable and welcome. Some examples of what you could include:
- Minimalist Scandinavian designs
- Plenty of space
- Light colors
- Natural light using skylights and floor to ceiling windows
- Cozy warm tones
- Good ventilation
- Calming colors
- Wooden furniture
- Water features
Have Adaptable Or Multi-Purpose Spaces
If you can install areas within your private medical facility that have multiple uses and can be adapted for those uses as need, be, you’ll have a highly effective and productive clinic that everyone can make use of. What you’ll also have is a clinic that people are happy to be in because it can be adapted to suit their needs – this might be physical needs such as using a wheelchair, or it could be mental health needs, such as needing to be in a room without too much stimulation. Whatever it is, if you can provide it in your clinic through your décor and your layout, you’ll gain a reputation for taking care of your patients – all your patients – in the very best way possible.
For your patients to have a more personalized experience within your private medical facility, you can use partitions to allow them to decide on their own level of privacy, for example. In the past, these partitions would have looked highly clinical; perhaps they might even be considered ugly in terms of their aesthetic, but today there are many different designs you can choose from that will match the rest of the décor in your clinic and that won’t look like they are too medical in nature, helping your patients immensely.
You can also incorporate function, light-weight furniture in your designs. Although you shouldn’t expect patients to move things around (unless they want to, of course), you and your team can change the way a room looks quickly and easily if you have this kind of functional and attractive furniture. You can also have portable lamps that can be taken from room to room, giving you a good light source no matter where you are or what you need. When you have furniture and other items that are adaptable, you can make your private medical facility exactly how you want it, benefitting you, your staff, and your patients in different ways.
Smart Integration Of Technology
When you are considering how you should design and decorate your medical facility, taking modern technology into account is an important element. No one will feel comfortable being treated in a clinic that doesn’t have the most up-to-date equipment and tech, so you’ll need to make sure you have it and that it functions in the right way. On top of that, you’ll need to work out how to incorporate it into your design aesthetic in the right way so that it doesn’t look out of place or too jarring, no matter how necessary it might be.
This can even all begin at the design stage – you can use virtual reality design software to ensure you have the very best design possible. By using this modern tech, you can effectively walk around your clinic before it’s even built, and at the very least before it’s decorated, and you’ll be able to see exactly what it will look like and determine what will and won’t work for your patients.
Include Art
If you want to ensure that everyone who comes into your private medical facility is happy and comfortable, then having some art included in your décor is a good idea. Pick images with bright, cheerful colors (as long as those colors don’t clash with the rest of your décor, of course) because this will make your patients feel good and relax them.
To make people feel even better about your clinic, you should commission art from local artists and ensure this fact is advertised, perhaps with an informative label by each picture, giving the name and location of the artist and some additional facts about the image itself. In this way, you are helping to integrate your clinic with the rest of your community, and this will entice more people to use you, thinking of you as their local healthcare center.
Bring The Outside In
If your décor aims to create a comfortable, welcoming atmosphere to help your customers feel at ease and relaxed, then you’ll already have seen a number of things you can do to ensure this is what you have. One other thing that could be included are plants. When you can bring the outside in and include a natural look to your décor with the use of potted plants, you are giving your patients not one but three different benefits.
The first benefit is that plants give off a sense of calm, ideal for a medical facility. They also increase productivity, so your staff members will be able to help patients more effectively. Finally, plants will always make any room they are in feel a lot more inviting. Add some plants, and you’ll instantly see the difference.