Different environments, services and layouts can greatly affect people who are living with dementia. Adapting design is critical in ensuring their safety and mental wellbeing are recognised. Considering and implementing several key design factors can help afford people living with dementia with meaningful engagement by providing essential prompts and accessibility, as well as reducing associated risks.

Dementia describes a collection of symptoms that are caused by disorders affecting the brain. It is not one specific disease. Dementia affects thinking, behaviour and the ability to perform everyday tasks.(1) Dementia is the second leading cause of death of Australians and it is currently estimated that 250 people are joining the population with dementia each day.(2)

Considering this, we believe that the care for people living with Dementia is becoming more important than ever and our built environment should be designed to assist with this care rather than contributing to negative patient outcomes. With dementia affecting more and more people, we believe that consideration should be made within all our projects, not just specific healthcare units.

Putting our design principles into practice

The Princess Alexandra Hospital Dementia & Delirium Inpatient Accommodation Unit

MODE were recently engaged for the design of the new Dementia & Delirium Inpatient Accommodation Unit at the Princess Alexandra Hospital (DDIAU) in Brisbane, Queensland. The DDIAU was designed to create a warm, welcoming and usable space for both the patients and the staff who work in the unit.

The Accommodation Unit is located within the busy hospital environment and the main consideration when designing the unit was around managing stimulation, with a focus on reducing negative stimulation and intuitively enhancing positive, calming stimulation. It was also critical for the staff, being experts in their field, to work collaboratively with the design team to achieve a caring and calming built environment for the patients.

Circuits And Dead End Corridors

Traditionally, dementia accommodation has focused on circuits, avoiding dead ends and creating a focal point such as a bus stop, while providing an emphasis on ‘familiar’ elements and activities. Through thorough research and feedback from other facilities, we found that these features are not necessarily best practice anymore, particularly the bus stops. Instead, understanding the behaviours which had informed these previous solutions has helped determine how we could achieve a more successful outcome.

In the past, design solutions for dead-end corridors have been to paint a mural of a garden path disappearing into the distance or applying an image of bookshelves. While the intention is to create familiar, visually pleasing graphics, the problem is that these elements appear real, but don’t perform their function.

This could cause a potentially confusing and distressing situation for the patient. Instead, graphics applied to the wall of a framed painting were used in the DDIAU. Most people are familiar with the idea that paintings are to be viewed but not touched, and a dead-end corridor with a visually calming painting at the end is not an unusual scenario.

*Designing for Dementia - Enhancing Dead End Corridors*

Visual Contrast (and no contrast)

Residential type, warm finishes were used throughout the design of the unit to increase the sense of a familiar environment. Throughout the Accommodation Unit, doors to patient access rooms were painted a high contrast colour, whereas doors to rooms for staff use were painted the same colour as the walls with grey skirting film applied to enhance the visual disguise.

Joinery for patient use were also constructed out of a dark, timber-look laminate. This provides increased visual contrast for the patients and enhances the residential look and feel. Conversely, the joinery and furniture for staff use was the opposite, with low contrast, commercial looking finishes used to discourage patient attention and use. These visual contrast design elements were utilised to provide an easy to navigate, familiar, calming interior environment.

Courtyard

The jewel within this project was the external courtyard. While some people may be very familiar with bus stops, even more people are familiar with their backyards. The ‘backyard’ courtyard in the Accommodation Unit included raised vegetable garden beds, ornamental garden beds, a potting bench, clothesline (for a familiar, therapeutic activity), garden benches, water features and watering can filling point. The intention was to design a backyard garden, with a geriatric ergonomics overlay, for the patients to interact with.

Conclusion

Our Health team were able to bring our health care design expertise together with the practical expertise of the staff to ensure the new unit focused on the needs required to care for people with dementia. In the end we have designed a space, specifically designed for the accommodation and care of people with dementia, but which would be perfectly suitable for the care of any patient.

We believe it is possible to design spaces that can be more considerate of people living with dementia without compromising other design objectives. Incorporating these simple techniques does not have to be to the detriment of other functional or aesthetic objectives. At MODE we consider all of the potential users of the spaces, creating better environments through unique design.