New CSA Z8000: Designing for improved patient outcomes

Safe and effective service delivery needs safe, effective, and well-designed health care facilities.  The first edition of Z8000 was a timely response to a national need for a Standard that codified Canadian and international best practices to create a common design reference for health care, and it pushed the field to accept innovative new design and construction ideas that would promote safe infrastructure for all building occupants and provide supportive, healing environments to improve patient outcomes.  modern health care facilities are extremely complex and critical environments with many work treatment, and living spaces, essential mechanical systems and services, and a broad range of medical technologies where caring and healing are meant to take place.  Health care users expect the infrastructure to be safe, responsive, reliable, and effective.  First published in 2011, CSA Z8000 was developed as a tool to weave all of these interrelated yet disparate components together into a comprehensive Standard to ensure that the safety, operational efficiency, and impacts to the physical environment and atmosphere only contribute positively to patient outcomes.  since then, research has been conducted to link some of the key design elements in Z8000 (single patient rooms, proper disposal waste, hand hygiene sinks, and requirements for airborne isolation rooms to have anterooms) with a reduction in infection rates and an improvement in hand hygiene compliance among staff, with a pending research project on the optimum faucet flowrate for hand hygiene.  The presentation will describe the rationale for updating original requirements with evidence-based expanded guidance to address advances in technology and changes in service delivery models over the past decade, including a new section on long-term care facilities, substantial revisions to ambulatory care and operative procedures to better align design requirements with the level of risk, and a thorough updating requirements from an infection prevention and control perspective.