New Requirements for post-COVID-19 Hospital Inpatient Wards: Evidence, Design Recommendations and Assessment Tools.

Background: The evolution of hospital infrastructures highlights the need of its physical space to respond to new technological, societal and epidemiological transformations such as those following the COVID-19 pandemic experience. Although the new emerged needs of user-centeredness, comfort and wellbeing within specific functional areas, there is still a lack of measurable indications for addressing these challenges in-patient wards. Study Design: The objective of this study is therefore to provide specific guidelines for the design of the in-patient ward, through measurable criteria and indicators based on evidence from the scientific literature, and to develop an assessment tool for its evaluation. Methods: A five-step process has been followed: (i) performing a literature review about hospital wards and wellbeing strategies, (ii) conducting a best practice analysis and comparison of a selection of international contemporary healthcare facilities, (iii) defining some dimensional requirements from the comparison, (iv) developing an assessment tool based on extracted criteria, (v) testing the tool on an existing project. Results: Amongst the criteria, several aspects have been highlighted ranging from qualitative indicators, as the clarity of wayfinding or the level of privacy, to quantitative values, as the percentage of single inpatient rooms or the distance between rooms and nursing stations. The assessment tool is composed by 20 indicators, associated to thematic areas and referred to three environmental units of the inpatient ward. Two types of scoring system are proposed. Conclusions: Starting from those considerations and tool wider applications, the future design of hospital wards could follow guidelines addressing user-centeredness, comfort and wellbeing.

Health and well-being key performance indicators in corporate sustainability disclosure. A review of sustainability reports from a sample of major European companies.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Health and Well-Being (HWB) measurement represents a key issue for companies in all sectors and a core element of social sustainability, according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite its importance for companies and in sustainability reporting, the topic has not been investigated yet from a cross-sectoral perspective. Therefore, this research aims to assess if health and well-being are disclosed in sustainability reports of the largest European companies. METHODS: The disclosure of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) has been investigated and compared according to the main international frameworks of sustainability. The research focused on sustainability reporting from a sample of the 30 largest companies in three methodological steps. First, the inclusion of HWB issues has been analyzed, identifying references to the SDGs and ISO 45001 within the documents. A second level of analysis considered the adoption of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) Standards, with particular attention to Health metrics (GRI:403). The third level of analysis aimed at researching health and well-being performances, linked to specific KPIs from two selected case studies. RESULTS: The review highlighted that all 30 companies generally refer to SDG 3 and SDG 8 in their sustainability reporting while 83%(n=25) of them also apply either Occupational Health and Safety ISO 45001 or Health metrics in GRI Standards; 22 (73%) companies adopted both GRI as the sustainability reporting standard and disclosed the adoption of ISO 45001 management system. Only in two cases, an additional structured framework for HWB is reported highlighting the need for more comprehensive KPIs, especially for employee's well-being. CONCLUSIONS: The study highlighted that health indicators disclosure is generally limited to GRI Standards disclosure. To achieve greater transparency in sustainability reporting, there is a need to further investigate the issue. (www.actabiomedica.it).