SON: Connections - Fall 2003

Headlines | Briefly | From the Deans Desk

Health Care By Design - Teri Oelrich Guides Architectural Plans that Fuse Patient, Caregiver and Client Needs

What happens when architects ask a nurse for her opinion? Teri Oelrich's dream job.

In fact, Oelrich, a 1984 graduate of the School of Nursing, plays a driving role in designing hospitals and health clinics. Oelrich's career perfectly blends her loves of health care and analysis, using both her BSN and MBA degrees. At NBBJ, an international architecture firm widely recognized for its expertise in designing health care facilities, Oelrich helps architects design buildings that support healing and health. In 1989, Oelrich became the first nurse that NBBJ hired.

Now a principal at the firm, Oelrich says, "I feel like I touch more patients now than I did as a nurse. Now when I help redesign a ward or redesign a surgery suite, I'm taking care of every single person that goes through there."

From operating rooms to long-term care facilities, Oelrich assesses needs and helps plan layouts and finances. When she first takes on a new project, it's all about the numbers-how many patients, length of stay, how much staff is needed. She then translates the numbers into the space needed-something brand new, a remodel or an addition, taking into account clinicians' preferences for layout.

Oelrich works on vastly different projects around the world-from the brand new Surgery Pavilion at the University of Washington Medical Center to a children's hospital in Shanghai, which she worked on with the World Health Organization.

In 1999 a client in New Zealand made Oelrich realize how much Americans take for granted when it comes to hospital stays. The hospital resisted her recommendation to move from four-bed wards to private rooms, assuming it would save money.

"It took every bit of knowledge I had on epidemiology, on infection rates, on the way people heal in a quiet environment," she says. "It took every study I'd ever done on the built environment and how it affects patients to convince the hospital to change after 200 years of doing it a certain way." In the end, the hospital opted for two-bed rooms, a great improvement over the larger wards.

Across the board, the trend is toward single rooms, Oelrich says, even in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). In collaboration with hospitals, Oelrich is studying whether the change is better for babies and how separate rooms affect staff, who are used to standing between bassinets and caring for infants at nearly the same time.

So far, two NBBJ clients have opened private-room NICUs, and three more are in the works. At Blank Children's Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, and Providence General Hospital in Everett, Wash., Oelrich collected data on length of stay, how much time parents spend in the room, noise level and infection rates in hopes of determining whether the private rooms shorten a baby's stay and improve their health.

"That's one of the most exciting things I've done because there's not a lot of evidence-based design happening right now," Oelrich says. "That's where you look at outcomes of the health of people and change the way you design a facility." The original data was presented to the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions in Seattle last year; Oelrich is currently analyzing a second year of data and will present her findings at an American Institute of Architects meeting in November.

"I feel like I've had a lot to do with changing the way architects work with the hospitals and bringing staff on board to help design," Oelrich says. "In their careers, all nurses are going to be involved in a building project and nurses can truly affect their environment. Volunteers and floor nurses need to speak up. I think when people realize they can make changes, that's when it gets fun."

Teri Oelrich '84 and her husband, Keith '84, live in Portland, Ore., with their two boys, Christopher and Jake.

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