Floor Planning 2
However, segregation was common not for all health care organizations and varied from state to state. For example, a few clinics treated patients of specific races just, while different offices were isolated by floor or segments, with better conveniences gave to white patients. Such health care facility design mirrored the prevailing racist policy and the deep racial divide that prevailed in the US society. However, the Civil Rights Movement has considerably impacted US society and racial policy (Pérez-Gosende et al., 2021). The Civil Rights Movement resulted in the desegregation and the elimination of the divide of the health care facility design on race. Since the 1960s, all patients had to be treated on equal ground, regardless of their racial background, and health care facilities have started to change to admit all patients regardless of their racial background.
At the same time, a noteworthy difference between the contemporary health care facility design and that of the past is the attitude to smoking and the construction of health care facilities concerning this issue. Smoking was also a common practice in the middle of the 20th-century health care hospitals, and the hospital design did not admit any areas for smoker-patients. In the second half of the 20th century, special areas for smoking were introduced, while now smoking is banned in hospitals (Pérez-Gosende et al., 2021). In such a way, the tolerant attitude to smoking in the past encouraged architects and designers to develop smoking-friendly facilities where patients and health care professionals could smoke. Today, such practices are unacceptable, and the health care facility design does not even include places for smoking, as a rule.
References
Pérez-Gosende, P., Mula, J., & Díaz-Madroñero, M. (2021). Facility layout planning. An extended literature review. International Journal of Production Research, 59(12), 3777-3816.