The Investigation of Physical Design, Executives' Attitude and Policy Towards Service Efficiency Based on Universal Design Principles; A Case Study of Naresuan University Hospital.

Abstract

Public hospitals should be designed to clover as wider inclusivity levels as possible forproviding access for all. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, a quality service is not always provided. When evaluation of the service quality in healthcare organizations is carried out, it is mostly conducted in terms of medical service quality, whilst the physical layout, functionality and facilitating devices are not given as much scrutiny. Post Occupation Evaluation (POE) is notably an efficient process for checking the satisfaction of users after the building has been in-used for a certain period of times. However, hospital is generally a type of building and service that need to support users with a variety of physical capabilities thus, a conventional POE may not cover all requirements of users, so this research has employed the UD concepts as a basis to combined with POE for evaluating service performance of a hospital of the case study, Naresuan University hospital, THAILAND. Even though the POE delivered a good design suggestion that is beneficial to users with a wide range of physical ability but that may not guarantee the new design will be agreed by all stakeholders and implemented through success. As a matter of fact, to success an implementing of a good design does not depend solely on a designer, specifically for this case study, a universal design to a hospital. This research found that to make UD perfectly effects in a hospital (in Thailand context) may require more supportive factors beyond just pointing out problems related to physical conditions of the design and suggest a design solution. As in the context of Thailand, this research identified 4 factors contributing to the success of UD which the designer should be accountable for (1) public understanding of the basic concepts of UD (2) all the related background such as culture, tradition and economic etc. that contributed the attitudes of all stakeholders (of the hospital) towards people with physical impairments (3) the rights, laws, regulations and policies for people with disabilities in the context of the country and (4) the participation of all types of users. And in doing so, this research added an extensive evaluation to the general POE to cover as more factors as possible to those involved with the design implementation. Therefore, an extensive evaluation process so called "Comprehensive Post-Occupancy Evaluation C-POE" has been created and employed in this study for offering more comprehensive solution that cover all possibilities cause of problems, the evaluation processes are as follows; (1) evaluating physical features and users' behavior (the experimental access audit), (2) examining administrative policy, HA and UD principles and (3) interviewing attitude of executives about UD.