Nursing Home Design: A Student Challenge and Call for Change

Nursing homes are a major provider of long-term and healthcare services in the United States. Over 1.4 million people reside in a nursing home at any given point in time. Despite this growth, many nursing homes today resemble small hospitals due to cumbersome code regulations, functional requirements, and budget restraints. With the cging of America, interior design educators and students can play a proactive role in designing nursing homes that are more residential in nature but meet stringent codes and functional requirements. This report presents a nursing home project given to junior-level interior design students in a FlDERaccredited program and describes how students were encouraged to avoid the hospital image through the use of specific instructional tools. Students proposed change in the design of the nursing home by implementing residentially-oriented solutions that were appropriate for the facility and its residents. The literature on federal funding of nursing homes, along with code and budget requirements for new nursing home construction, is reviewed. The teaching precedents, instructional tools, project components, learning experiences, and student work ore described, along with student reactions to the project. The project successfully engaged students in creotive change in the design of residential nursing homes. In the future, however, more emphasis on the meaning of home, economic restraints, and exploration of other models of design should occur.