Emerging approaches to hospital care and hospital architecture.

One cannot speak about emerging approaches to hospitals and hospital design without taking into consideration the ever-increasing changes in the structure of all aspects of today's society: cultural, economic, educational, scientific, social and technological. The design of health care is interwoven with all of these changes. Health facilities design is an outcome of a collective effort of all those involved in both the design and execution of projects. Success in laying down the features of new approaches to hospitals and their design depends to a large extent on our ability to confer and co-operate with each other, to learn from the past, to anticipate the needs of the future and to influence the direction of all developments, based on the strength of knowledge and creativity. In this article, both authors give their views on these issues.

[Time factors in endoscopic studies. A survey in West Germany]. / Zeitaufwand für endoskopische Untersuchungen. Eine Umfrage in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

In order to obtain representative data for the orientation of personal requirements in endoscopic units, 650 hospitals in the FRG were asked to have an exact look at the times they needed for endoscopic procedures during an period of 14 days. 25% of the contacted hospitals answered to this request and thus the times required for more than 14,000 endoscopic procedures for both, doctors and medical staff, could be analysed. Results revealed that most of the sophisticated procedures such as colonoscopy, ERCP (especially when they included therapeutic endoscopical methods) varied largely in time. This was caused by different factors such as the patient dependent variables, and the course of the procedure including observation of safety and hygiene standards. Average values of times needed for endoscopic procedures were as follows (time in minutes): (Table: see text). The data given above might be of value for the estimation of actual personal and time requirements in endoscopic units.