Trauma-informed Design Guides SCO Household Of Companies Clinic

SCO Family of Services supplies kids and households all through New York Metropolis and Lengthy Island entry to a continuum of care that features bodily and psychological well being, wellness, training, housing, household youth justice companies, and household help.

Whereas the group operates a number of places round Jamaica, Queens, its Genovese Household Life Middle serves because the hub of the group’s programming within the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, after years in operation, the middle was feeling the constraints of its ageing constructing. “It was an outdated maze of places of work and corridors and useless ends,” says Hayden Blades, vp of amenities and property administration for SCO Household of Companies. “We needed to convey a recent look to the house and make it extra environment friendly.”

Making a renovation plan

The aim was to renovate the present four-story constructing, which the group owned, with fashionable, versatile shopper areas and workspaces. SCO Household of Companies aimed to consolidate employees working in different leased areas into the renovated location to enhance employees efficiencies in addition to cut back actual property prices.

Moreover, the renovation would offer the chance to make use of design methods that help its purchasers, a lot of whom have gone by traumatic experiences and obtain counseling and help companies on the heart. “We needed them to have an area the place they felt secure and comfy,” Blades says.

Recent healthcare facility

Opened in October 2022, the constructing’s first flooring homes a lot of the public-facing companies such because the foster care program’s medical clinic, which features a ready space, two examination rooms, clinician places of work, and phlebotomy lab.

On the identical flooring, the foster care household visiting room affords a big, inviting space for start mother and father to carry supervised visits with their kids.

The higher ranges every have public-facing rooms for psychological well being counseling in addition to redesigned employees workspaces. Within the latter, enclosed places of work had been changed with open-floor layouts and assorted settings that help completely different wants, together with shared cubicles organized alongside the perimeter to maximise pure mild on the flooring and convention and counseling rooms housed within the core.

Using trauma-informed design

Working with Spacesmith (New York), the mission crew utilized ideas of trauma-informed design to ship a setting that promotes therapeutic all through the constructing. For instance, using research that present curvilinear types in inside settings could make individuals really feel extra serene than rectilinear shapes, the mission crew designed all 90-degree corners and hall soffits in mushy curves.

Biophilic parts are additionally employed all through, reminiscent of nature-themed wallcoverings within the examination rooms and gender-neutral bogs and woodgrain doorways and carpeting with a stone-like sample.

“The thought is to get away from an institutional really feel to one thing that’s going to make individuals really feel welcome, relaxed, and calm,” says Ambar Margarida, principal at Spacesmith.

Addressing security in healthcare environments

Within the former setting, the middle utilized institutional furnishings that had been bolted to the ground to deal with safety wants.

In the course of the renovation, Margarida says the mission crew targeted on addressing security with out impacting the general aesthetic. For instance, within the reception space, exhausting, plastic chairs had been changed with weighted, high-backed mushy furnishings in curvilinear configurations.

Blade says the intense and ethereal house has been properly acquired by employees and purchasers. “Everybody who comes within the house is awed by the transformation,” he says.

Anne DiNardo is government editor of Healthcare Design. She might be reached at [email protected].