Mimarların yoğun bakım ünitelerinde erişilebilirlik konusundaki endişelerinin kanıta dayalı tasarıma başvurarak değerlendirilmesi

Due to the technological and medical improvements and awareness of the patient-centered approach, architectural design interventions of nursing units in healthcare centers are becoming very important to provide a suitable care process. Among various nursing units, the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) environment needs to provide constant and quick access to patients in terms of visibility and physical accessibility. In this field, there is various evidence beyond the architectural filed such as medical, social, or nursing that clarifies the impacts of the visual and physical accessibility features on the patients' safety and staff efficiency in ICUs. These issues force healthcare architects to find ICUs' accessibility features by using different sources of knowledge from different disciplines. However, there are difficulties for healthcare architects to gather explicit knowledge in a systematic approach and consider them in ICUs' design process. Evidence-Based Design (EBD), as a systematic and scientific approach, provides a way for healthcare architects to gather scientific knowledge through the Systematic Review (SR). This study aims to evaluate the architects' concern about visual and physical accessibility in ICUs' design with the help of EBD. For achieving this aim, two ICUs were observed in Iran and Finland. Then, SR was conducted to find visual and physical accessibility features that impact the patients' safety and staff efficiency in ICUs. After that, ten healthcare architects (from Turkey) were interviewed with fifteen open-ended and close-ended questions. Finally, qualitative data were evaluated by referring to SR's findings. According to the results, there was a gap between design and scientific research in the ICUs' design process, and architects did not refer to any scientific research through the design process. It was found that the architects' knowledge about accessibility features was routed in various sources, including design guidelines, medical advisor, designed projects, personal experiences, and firm's demands through ICUs' design process. It is concluded that the EBD can improve the architects' approach to design a safe and efficient ICUs' environment.