Description

Fitting two-bed rooms into a radial floor plan is particularly challenging because the tapered room shape makes it hard to create two equally good bed places. At the Universitätsklinikum Münster, two nested bathrooms have been arranged spaced apart between the rooms, creating a niche for the bed closest to the door, or for a comfortable sofa area in the single rooms.

The renovation and restructuring of the patient rooms in the east and west towers housing the wards of Münster University Hospital (UKM) are part of the “University Medicine 2025” project, which is the culmination of a study begun in 2014 by the UKM and the Medical Faculty of the Westphalian Wilhelms University Münster aimed at developing robust sustainable strategies for hospitals.

While the façades of the so-called bed towers have already been renovated, the renovation and restructuring of the wards within is ongoing. The new plan will accommodate either 38 beds in two-bed rooms or 19 beds in single rooms, depending on the occupancy concept. The rooms are watched over from a nurses’ station at the centre of each floor with the ancillary functional spaces. Patient rooms can be allocated to one or the other nurses’ station according to the “floating principle” so that the hospital can react flexibly to changing patient occupancy levels. The creation of care groups spanning different clinical treatment areas is also planned.

The interiors of the patient rooms will change significantly. The structure of the new façade has been hung in front of the existing concrete parapet elements making it possible to incorporate the previous escape balconies into an enlarged room design. To provide fresh air to the room, a vent casement can be opened. The façade construction with internal window elements and external skin optimises thermal insulation in winter and prevents overheating in summer thanks to solar shading elements arranged between the layers.

The room enlargement makes it possible to position the bathrooms along the partition wall between two patient rooms, and in turn to stagger the position of the beds in a two-bed room, avoiding the problem of there being a “window-bed” and “corridor-bed” as commonly seen in parallel bed arrangements. Here, each position has its own qualities and an unobstructed view through the large window, as well as a spacious zone around each bed for greater privacy and receiving visitors. Arranging beds in opposite directions also facilitates better interaction between room occupants. In the single rooms, typically for patients with private health insurance, the niche can be used for a seating area instead of a second bed. The placement of the bathrooms between the rooms also ensures that staff have a good view of both patients, as does the radial structure which gives the hospital building its iconic, recognisable form.

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