While it is imperative to develop building design innovation to adapt to new care models and organisational processes in residential care facilities, there is a lack of research evidence on the interplay between design and resident lived experience, particularly when examined through a building design lens. This study aims to explore the building design factors that contribute to residents' quality of life (QoL), and thus, their ability to find home. The research objectives are to: 1) document and analyse the layout and spatial design of three different typologies (Traditional, Medium, and Small Household models) against key QoL themes and the residents' everyday lived use and sense of feeling at home; and 2) compare the architectural, layout, and lived use of the three typologies through a socio-spatial lens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: To evaluate the connection between residential aged care architecture, the residents' ability to find home and Quality of Life themes.
Design: This study uses convergent qualitative mixed methods approach across the three phases of the research project to explore the lived experience of residential aged care residents, their family members, and direct care staff.
Methods: The chosen qualitative methodology is based on a constructionist paradigm and uses a combination of observations, photo production and prompted discussions, and architectural visual data collection methods.
Aust N Z J Public Health
February 2016
Objective: This opportunistic natural study investigated the effects of relocation of office workers from a 30-year-old building to a new purpose-built building. The new building included an attractive central staircase that was easily accessed and negotiated, as well as breakout spaces and a centralised facilities area. The researchers aimed to determine the impact of the purpose-built office building on the office workers' sedentariness and level of physical activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The workplace is a setting where sedentary behaviour is highly prevalent. Accurately measuring physical activity and sedentary behaviour is crucial to assess the impact of behavioural change interventions. This study aimed to evaluate the reliability and criterion validity of the Occupational Sitting and Physical Activity Questionnaire (OSPAQ) and compare with data collected by accelerometers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Comprehensive health promotion in Western Australia has been conducted from the point of views of policy development, promotion, education and service delivery. Much of this recent work has been focused on supporting workplaces - but there has yet to be any real focus on the design of the actual physical workplace environment from a health promotion perspective.
Aims: This paper is aimed at highlighting the gap in health promotion knowledge by addressing how the disciplines of architecture and health promotion can work together to challenge the regulations that dictate design practice and ultimately bridge that gap for long-term change.
The modern hospice movement emerged in the late 1960s largely as a reaction to the way in which death and dying were dealt with in the hospital building. From the early development of the hospice movement, setting was considered to be very important. Hospice buildings were more residential and "homely" than their hospital counterparts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis brief account of a patient severely affected with familial hypercholesterolemia and with coronary artery disease since age 13 reviews his therapy and survival into the fifth decade of life. This is heretofore unreported in phenotypically homozygous patients with familial hypercholesterolemia in the era before statin drugs, low-density lipoprotein apheresis, or their combination.
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