Better design for clinical isolation

Jamie Brewster, architect at MJ Medical, has spent the last 25 years designing clinical spaces for hospitals around the world. When he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2020, a three-week stint in hospital isolation for stem-cell transplantation led him to question every room he had ever designed. He is now on a mission to understand others’ experience of clinical isolation and to figure out how, through better UK design standards, we can improve them. In this piece, he shares his own experience of isolation and what his initial research has taught him.

What is an inpatient isolation bedroom? Is it not essentially the same as any inpatient bedroom, but with a small lobby attached to regulate air quality? In reality this is not the case — a conventional bedroom and an isolation bedroom are, in fact, very different.

Isolating patients has been a method of treating disease for many years. Since Old Testament times and the establishment of leper colonies, isolation has been seen as an effective means of dealing with infection risk. Sometimes, patients are subject to 'source isolation' because they present a hazard to others, for example because they carry a highly infectious disease such as Ebola virus or because they present a radiation risk due to iodine 131 treatment for thyroid problems. In other cases, the patient may be severely immunocompromised and needs protective isolation from all sources of infection. In either case, the term 'isolation' is key and perhaps indicates the main difference between this type of inpatient room and other more conventional types.