Designing for Health Sciences Education

Educational facilities everywhere are seeking to create optimal learning spaces for health sciences, and there are three major underlying themes that must be considered when designing these spaces. This article examines the acceleration of digital learning, generational influences on teachers and students and advances in the understanding of how we learn, as well as a foreword on the evolution of the field of medicine.

The evolution of healthcare and medicine over the last few decades, as driven by the global landscape, has had a significant impact on health sciences curriculum and what future professionals need to learn. This article considers these ideas and applies them to what that means for the spaces that need to be designed to support this type of learning.

Having covered what the healthcare and health sciences educational landscapes look like, this article focuses on how some of the spaces required for that education, such as lecture halls and classrooms, need to evolve to meet those landscapes. We discuss how institutions need to take a hard look at these spaces and determine what the best options are to provide value to students, as well as the schools themselves.

In today’s hands-on, experiential learning environment, being able to practice concepts they learn is essential in the education of future healthcare professionals. Spaces like simulation suites and clinical skills centres are becoming commonplace in higher education, and this article dissects the operational and design considerations that must be taken into account when implementing these highly complex areas.

Aside from traditional classrooms and lecture halls and highly technical simulation suites, the importance of multidisciplinary, mulituse and special use spaces, such as basic instructional labs for science and anatomy, is more important than ever. This article discusses designing these flexible labs as institutions balance growing space and subject needs, as well as varying class sizes and learning methods.

Today, support for student and faculty health and well-being are major goals of most institutions. This is especially true in the health sciences, where the rapid evolution of fields and the increased understanding of the pressures that students and faculty face have led to calls for transforming health sciences education altogether. While student and faculty health and well-being should be a top priority in all spaces within educational facilities, we highlight some key considerations in this article.