Abstract:
The Emergency Department’s (ED) role is to receive, stabilize and treat patients (adults and children) who present themselves or otherwise with a wide variety of urgent and non-urgent conditions. This thesis concentrates on investigation and evaluation of the structural relationship between the physical components of the Unit and its users. Considering ED role as the foundation of a healthcare building, this thesis addresses users experience on the areas of current hospitals Emergency Department (Shkodra’s Regional Hospital) project in terms of spaces and components that attribute to it. The connection between space and its users is taken in consideration, how puts up with their experience and wellbeing. To explore the contribution of environmental perception to overall satisfaction of the ED users. Methods used to help this thesis were data collections through observations, questionnaires, interviews, video recording and pictures. Patients, visitors and medical staff of Shkodra’s Regional Emergency Department, as the main users of the building, contributed on the data collected. There was no limit on age or sex and every category had its own space to represent their thought on the matter. From the data’s collected users had different approach to the issue. Space insufficiency contributes to the users unsatisfaction. Staff in precepted an increase of stress from the lack of space they worked on by the overcrowding. The sanitarians felt more stressed at work than every other category and had the most negative answers about the lack of space, making us think that a relation does exist. They consider the space as one of the elements that contributed to their stress at work.
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The nurses were significantly more satisfied than the doctors and sanitarian on terms of space. Doctors found difficulties too, even though they had the least number of spaces they used most. Different from the staff, patients associated overcrowding with noises. Noise was a very important factor on patient satisfaction on adding more to their medical condition. 74.4 % of the patients interviewed testified that noise had an effect on their comfort. The decrease of deaths with 42.5% after the remodulation shows us that space must have had a positive impact on patients.
