Description

Fixed screens between two beds are an uncommon fixture and even here in the Sana Clinik in Munich are only found in the rooms for private healthcare patients. The spacious rooms show the kind of privacy and comfort possible in a two-bed room when there is sufficient space and budget.

The Sana Kliniken Solln Sendling GmbH originally operated orthopaedic clinics at two locations which were merged in May 2017 to form the Sana Health Campus at Munich-Sendling. Designed as a district-level hospital, it includes facilities for diagnostics, surgery and intensive care along with the corresponding nursing wards. The compact, five-storey building wraps around the perimeter of an urban block and sits alongside a listed building. Its upper floors look onto an open inner courtyard and house two wards per floor with a total of 173 beds. The clinic with a gross floor area of 6600 m² treats more than 8000 patients per year.

The ward corridors are spacious and offer a range of different seating areas to provide motivational stopover and rest points for patients with locomotive impairments, for example after hip or knee operations. To make it easier for patients to stand up after sitting, the seat height of the chairs and armchairs has been slightly raised from the normal height of 45 cm to 48 or 50 cm. The standard two-bed patient rooms face onto the inner courtyard with a projecting bay window at the end that provides better illumination and serves as a niche for a window-side table for writing or dining. The low sill height maximises the window size and allows patients lying in bed to see out of the window.

The fittings and furnishings in both the standard and private healthcare patient rooms aim to create an atmosphere more akin to a hotel than a hospital. The brightly lit rooms with their tastefully painted white and beige walls are complemented by black and white photographs of well-known squares and sights in Munich, either elegantly framed in the standard rooms or as wall-size photographs in the private healthcare patient rooms. In addition to the beige wall tones, private healthcare patients can enjoy white fitted furniture and black armchairs and the bed headwall with medical connections are finished with a dark wood decor, as are the floors. The spacious entrance lounge area of the two-bed rooms for private healthcare patients are the product of combining two single-bed room layouts. A central partition in the middle ensures each patient has their own space, each with a separate window. The low, deep-set window sill can be used as a bench, creating an attractive visitor zone for each patient.

For optimal cleaning and hygiene, the surfaces have been made as seamless as possible, both around the walls and on the floors. The PVC flooring has upturned coved skirting to avoid corners and hairline seams which are particularly susceptible to germ contamination. Where joints were necessary, they were made large enough to receive proper grouting. Each floor has one or two quarantine rooms with an airlock for isolating individual patients with viral or bacterial infections.

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Originally published in: Wolfgang Sunder, Julia Moellmann, Oliver Zeise, Lukas Adrian Jurk, The Patient Room, Birkhäuser, 2020.