A Break Room Makeover Research Study

Healthcare professionals are vulnerable to fatigue and stress due to the demands of their work and their actual work environment. This presentation will share how Nurture by Steelcase and Spectrum Health developed the design principles, design interventions, and measurement activities for break rooms in a medical-surgical nursing unit and a perioperative unit. Caroline Kelly will discuss methods used to evaluate the eff­ect of the interventions, including electronic surveys, time-lapse video observation, and content analysis.  Caroline will show how video data supported survey findings validating statistically significant increases in satisfaction over time.

Key Note Speaker

 Caroline Kelly, EDAC, IDSA, Senior Design Researcher, Nurture by Steelcase

Caroline Kelly is a Senior Design Researcher for Nurture by Steelcase and Steelcase Inc. She specializes in human-centered design research on healthcare delivery and environments. She is interested in both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research to uncover needs, design to them and their measure their impact.

Recent projects include the effect of the design of a break room on healthcare staff rest and rejuvenation with Spectrum Health, the results of which will be presented at the HealthCare Design Conference ’11.

She is conducting ongoing research with University of Kentucky HealthCare on the effect of the design of a Chair-centric Fast Track for low acuity patients in an Emergency Department. 

Her work has been published in HERD, HealthCare Design Magazine and Facility Care. 

She has a Masters Degree in Industrial Design from the Georgia Institute of Technology where she was a Research Assistant at the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access as well as the Human Factors Lab at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.