Colour-coding

To make it easy for patients to find their way around, the team used colours to create zones in the centre to highlight the various medical disciplines. The walls, doors, chairs and signs within a zone share matching colours.

“Some elderly patients are unable to read, so colour-coded walls and chairs, for example, are a better way to demarcate areas rather than highlighting medical disciplines,” says Ms Wong.

New signs use larger text, high colour contrast and pictograms to make them easier for patients to read.

Similar changes have also been made to Level 1, which houses several SOCs. At the entrance, there is now a coloured floorplan with the location of clinics and amenities displayed at eye level for wheelchair users. The new clinic signs are also colour-coded to match their colour on the floorplan.

Considering user needs

Elsewhere in SGH, one of 16 SingHealth institutions, other works are underway to make it simpler for patients to find their way around.

As a key part of a big exercise to make all SingHealth institutions more agefriendly, a team of 15 staff from across SingHealth came up with a design manual. The SingHealth 10-Point Plan details how to improve healthcare infrastructure design and wayfinding at 10 interaction points during a patient’s visit, from entry to exit.

The manual was completed in 2014, after two years of studying the Building and Construction Authority (BCA)’s Accessibility Code and gathering feedback from patients, visitors and hospital staff. The team also consulted local and overseas specialists in low-vision mobility and Universal Design experts from the BCA.

“In the past, we used to maximise the number of chairs we had in the waiting areas to cope with the crowd, but we realised this left little room for those in wheelchairs,” says Ms Yong Seow Kin, Director, Facilities Development, SingHealth, who is part of the team who developed the SingHealth 10-Point Plan.

“[The manual offers] recommendations on how to arrange the chairs, the distance between them, where to position wheelchair users, and even the chair specifications.”

These guidelines came in handy during the SOC renovations.

For example, the waiting rooms at the new clinics now have seats in the front rows clearly marked for the elderly and also space for wheelchair users.

To address the needs of wheelchair users, the consultation rooms in the clinics were enlarged and now come with wider two-leaf doors.

There is also a video loop playing in the clinic to help kidney patients who need to take multiple urine samples daily to recall their steps.

But the process of making navigation simple is not always easy. For one thing, working within an existing, decades-old, space posed certain constraints, says Ms Wong.

For example, the team was not able to widen the toilets within the CDLD according to the guidelines.

“Sometimes it was not possible to follow the plan strictly, so we took what worked best for each unique space. The bottom line was that patients’ needs and ability to manoeuvre are not compromised,” she says.

Careful planning also had to be done for the renovation of the CDLD as it was done while operations were still running. Works were carried out in six phases – mostly in the evenings and on weekends – for a year.

But judging by the ease with which patients are now moving around and the time saved, having a good wayfinding system in the hospital is clearly the way to go.

Other Stories: The Design Issue

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• Deliberately Designed
• To See A World In A Grain Of Sand