In a room filled with architects, acting Surgeon General Rear Admiral Boris D. Lushniak shook up the common definition of our profession by saying that “if you are an architect, you are a public health worker.”
And many architects were already with him. We have been expanding our thinking beyond typical individual buildings to create healthy blocks, corridors and neighborhoods by shaping what they do within the property line so it’s responsive to what’s happening outside the property line. This in itself is not new, but doing so to improve health and wellness, while leveraging the resources of large civic-minded institutions, is a new approach to a traditional problem.
MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio has taken on this mindful, responsive approach while morphing from an isolated hospital into an inclusive community health center. This process flips the paradigm of health delivery; instead of focusing on the hospital as the first line of defense in the care and wellbeing of a population, it is now the last stop.
[For more of this story, written by Shannon Kraus, go to http://www.rwjf.org/en/culture...igning_the_hosp.html]
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