Augmenting Walkability, Visibility and Arrangement for Korean ICU

Clinical teams are facing increasing demands to perform more consistently and efficiently in delivering improved health outcomes. Hospital management team in Korea face difficulties in complex routine task for nurse, which result in workforce burnout, fatigue, foot and hip ailments from the necessary walking during a single shift on corridors as questionnaire suggested. Three analysis of variance as walkability, visibility and arrangement are applied as programmed attributes from a set of seven Korean adult intensive care units (ICUs), namely SNUH, SSMU, SCC, DUIH, KUMC, PNUH, YUHS. These ICUs are accepted as the best- performing prototypes by the Korean Institute of Healthcare Architecture as Acute Care Medicine. This study systematically analyses the Nurse Station (NS) visit to the patient bed, than calculates minimum round route on the ICUs depth map plan; with aid of the connectivity on supply chain simulation analytical tool ‘route stop' of LogWare. It was found that the maximum walk was calculated for the singular NS at KUMC where primary NS walks 542.005 feet zigzag path and secondary NS walks 214.814 feet linear path. Conclusively, ANOVA predicted three optimum arrangements which were concentric around NS: L-Shape, U- Space or O- Shape scored 5/5 thus walking for nurse reduces and utmost visibility was illustrated. On the contrary I shape and zigzag pattern was recognized as not very efficient arrangement with 2/5 score, due to an increase in walking and reduction in visibility to the last patient in the row.