The case against hospital beds

When the health care industry talks about hospitals, it tends to use the language of facility planners—one in which “patients” and “beds” are equivalent. This is the legacy of a very different era in medicine. Modern hospitals are historically rooted in the sanatoria and asylums of the mid-19th century, originally conceived to isolate patients with conditions such as tuberculosis and lunacy from the community, not to protect their rights. The move from open wards to closed rooms was perhaps the first major reform in hospital design—motivated by a need for isolation as our understanding of communicable diseases and infection control became more sophisticated.

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