Clinic Design Post-Occupancy Evaluation Toolkit

Why: Evaluation and feedback are key to improving the built environment, especially when it involves the larger community. A post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of an ambulatory care building can provide insight on:

• Identifying and solving problems in the built environment
• Fine-tuning the building according to user needs and feedback
• Ongoing building adaptions due to changing organizational needs

What: The pdf version of this POE toolkit is publicly accessible through the Center for Healthcare Design website (www.healthdesign.org). The toolkit is designed to be self-administrated so that individual CHCs can download and use the POE toolkit by themselves. (An Excel version of the toolkit with more robust functions in automatic score calculation and so on is available with CHD’s Affiliate Plus membership. The CHD research team also provides advisory services ranging from toolkit customization to better fit other outpatient facility types, assistance in conducting the POE, to unbiased analysis, review, and interpretation of results.)

How: This Toolkit offers five tools to assist with a health-care facility post occupancy evaluation:

Tool 1: General Information, Organizational Goals & Design Principles forms are designed to collect basic information about the provider information and the building project, as well as the model of care, organizational challenges and goals, design intent, etc.

Tool 2: Audit Of Physical Environment provides a rating system for a set of design features. The tool is organized by major CHC spaces and is intended for an interdisciplinary team, including a Community Health Care representative and front-line staff representatives and designers to walk through spaces (with paper/pen or a laptop) and observe whether design features are implemented and rate how well the features meet certain criteria.

Tool 3: Patient Questionnaire: a two-page, paper format questionnaire to gathers patient perceptions of the clinic environment and service quality.

Tool 4: Staff Questionnaire: An anonymous, three-page questionnaire (3 pages) on staff perception of environmental design and work experience.

Tool 5: Outcome Data Collection Form facilitates data collection of outcomes related to the selected goals and design intents.