Herman Miller Healthcare

Herman Miller Healthcare Scholars Program for Intern Architects in Healthcare

Essay – 300 to 400 word description of your interest and experience in healthcare architecture: The essay should  state why attending the conference is important to you, your career and how you plan on using what is learned at the conference in the future.

As a highly seasoned thirty-something with a double background in Architecture and Graphic Design, multiple certifications and a plethora of new knowledge gained daily, I have realized that healthcare is the most unspeakable term to ever speak of.  Healthcare is always naturally inching in our professional lives.  Gaining experience with healthcare planners, field measuring patient rooms, LEED certifying hazardous storage rooms, any of this is priceless and helps save lives.  This industry is impossible to separate from other industries.  Art consultants or electricians involved help make a difference with a patient or a nurse’s safety. 

No matter the demographics or geography or economic status, our aging population is expanding more and more uncontrollably.  Buildings come and go, depending on long term benefits and hopefully LEED certification achievements.  Our Earth does not come and go nor do our human lives.  One day we will age and have to live on the planet as a consequence of how much we paid attention to saving it.  Thus, our health is “walking the line” as quoted by Johnny Cash. 

With today’s craving for more patient rooms and more accommodating staff, healthcare has the most demanding strings needing to tie a knot for recovery, help, and strength for patients as well as staff to stay healthy and live well.

Monetary standards, natural resources and safety concerns are sometimes out of our control.  A physician helping children in a war-torn country is just as phenomenal as saving a cancer patient’s life in America.  Unfortunately, resources, time and investment in volunteering in a third world country is so rewarding that the number of staff needed is sadly way too low.

Healthcare is so indescribable that it is always “under construction” and is always in need of safer, cost-efficient, and sustainable practices.

A year ago, I was rewarded the experience of specifying all FF&E (furniture, furnishings and equipment) systems for a hospital relocation, under a 1.5 billion dollar expansion of the medical campus at The Ohio State University.  After going through at least 100 rooms, offices and storage closets, I was so absorbed by how these facilities were laid out.  My passion for helping patients was elevating more and more as I spent more and more hours specifying. 

Another project involved was using LEED certified or sustainable approaches.  I was assigned to take required environmental items such as recycled wastebaskets and mop carts and logically place them in a smart fashion for the patient.  I imagined myself as a patient in order to design best practices for staff to routinely clean out rooms, improve safety for patient/staff, enhance shorter shifts, and hire minimum staff.

I would be honored as one of the selected young interns to attend the Healthcare Conference.  Not only would this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity enhance my career, but I would teach older generation medical staff as well as newly licensed, hired nurses on new knowledge gained. Improved results succeed once you diversify your knowledge and spread to different industries and different age groups, patients as well as doctors.  Old will become the “new” new.