No matter whether your medical centre requires new interior design ideas or a complete renovation in the New Year, it’s a good idea to get up to date with all of the latest trends and start brainstorming ideas for what you could apply to your own practice or hospital design. Once you have an understanding of the direction that the healthcare industry is headed in, you can team up with specialist designers to work your medical centre design to benefit your patients and stay ahead of your competitors.
What Are the Different Kinds of Medical Fitouts?
Health centre fitouts tend to fall into one of several categories. They can be a redesign aimed at simplifying use of the centre by patients. They can be aimed at enhancing the work environment for the staff. They can be aimed at reducing infection potential with smart use of materials. Or they can be an attempt to improve on all these areas, while adhering to some of the exciting trends taking off in interior design right now.
What Are the Key Design Trends for 2022?
Feels Like Home
Gone are the days of clinical, cookie-cutter medical fitouts. While there was once a time where healthcare design was such that you could walk into almost any medical centre in Perth and notice very little difference in the decorating styles, we’re now beginning to see a change for the better.
In an effort to make healthcare visits more comfortable, reception areas, waiting rooms and consultation rooms are now favouring an interior design style that replicates the look of a home and evokes a welcoming feeling. Practitioners want their hospital interior or medical practice fitout to make patients feel as though they are entering their home, as opposed to a sterile environment that may induce stress and anxiety.
It’s also becoming more and more common for a healthcare fitout to have its own sense of character. From the choice of the furniture and décor right down to the lighting and artwork, every detail of a clinic interior design is aimed at expressing the unique personality of the centre and its team members. Where once a generic painting would hang on the wall for the sake of adding some colour to a wall space, now specific pieces are selected to create a certain medical design effect.
Bring the Outside Inside
We’ve been seeing a rise in biophilic interior trends in design across residential, commercial and medical fit outs for a little while now, and the trend isn’t likely to slow down any time soon. Biophilia is all about bringing elements of nature into interior design, such as potted greenery, wooden floors and stone benches. You can get as creative as you like in incorporating nature into your medical centre, from skylights to water features.
With proven health benefits, it’s no wonder that biophilic design is so popular in a medical centre fitout. From indoor plants reducing air pollution to natural elements providing mood boosters, there is a lot to be gained from bringing the outdoors into your medical fit out.
All About Flexibility
In catering to all different types of patients, modern medical centres are providing versatile waiting areas that can be adapted to various needs. By having easy to move furniture, the layout can be modified to provide a suitable space for a family to sit together, or for a single patient to sit quietly alone. This sustained use of space planning in healthcare fitouts also allows elderly patients, new mothers and other patients with special needs to adjust the environment for their own comfort.
Into the Blue
On an annual basis, the Pantone Colour Institute announces a colour of the year and the selected shade tends to have a widespread impact on fashion, marketing and, of course, design trends. This year Pantone has declared Very Peri to be the colour of 2022. If you’re not completely familiar with this tone, you’re probably not alone. This newness is cited by Pantone as one of its virtues, being a fresh and bold shade to accompany a world facing up to new challenges and new opportunities.
What colour is it, though? It’s blue. With a touch of purple.
Designers in all manner of fields tend to incorporate the latest Pantone shades into aspects of their work, and medical office design trends are likely to prove no exception to this.
Kind to the Planet
Energy efficiency has been a high priority for businesses and homeowners for many years now, and with environmental issues becoming more and more prevalent, the need to be kind to the planet and reduce energy consumption is only growing stronger.
Today’s medical fit out is ditching the tungsten and fluorescent globes for economical LEDs, including Indigo LEDs that are known to reduce bacteria. The use of natural light where possible is also becoming more of a focus, as well as the improvement of insulation quality to minimise the need for heating and cooling systems. In these and other ways, environmental factors are being worked into clinics by design.
Is it Time for You to Get a New Fitout?
After the events of the last little while, a great many medical centres are flagging up with a new look that they’re ready to move on into a new era. Whether you should do the same is up to you, but it has to be said that a fresh new design will do a lot to signal to your patients that you’re facing up to the future with confidence. It will also do a good deal to improve your staff’s morale and perspective on work.
How Can You Get the Best Fitout?
Start by discussing the matter with your staff. It makes sense to gain the benefit of their viewpoints, and, besides, any morale benefit will be cancelled out if there’s a sense that the design has been implemented without their input.
This will give you some valuable insights into optimal layout (for instance the benefit of a well-placed office partition in terms of enhanced privacy and reduced disturbance). You can then proceed to linking up with industry experts to deliver a medical centre fitout that satisfies those that spend most time in it.
Get a Modern Medical Fit Out
If you’re looking to undertake a renovation or redesign of your Perth based medical centre in 2022, Office Fitout Professionals can work with you to create a trend interiors solution that’s not only up to date with the latest concepts interior design contains, but also well-suited to health care industry needs. Contact our friendly team of experts today.