Steps in Developing a Patient-Centered Measure of Hospital Design Factors

Abstract

Patients and families are at the center of care and have important perspectives about what they see occurring surrounding their healthcare, yet organizations do not routinely collect such perspectives from patients/families. Creating patient-centered measures is essential to understanding what they perceive about the environment as well as achieving the goal of patient-centered care. We focus this research methodology column on describing a four-step medical ethnography approach that can be used in developing patient-centered measures of interest to those studying built environments. In this column, we use this approach to illustrate how one might develop a measure that can be used to understand parent perceptions of the safety culture in neonatal intensive care units.

Keywords: neonatal intensive care units; patient safety; patient-centered care; research methodology.