A proposal of the weed method as a health care facility planning tool

[摘要] An evaluation of planning approaches currently used by health care facility planners reveals several advantageous elements necessary to plan responsive health care facilities. The Weed method, a patient cat problem-solving tool currently used by health care personnel, incorporates these elements and appears to meet the requirements of an effective tool for health care facility planning. This method, also called the P.O.M.R. (Problem-Oriented Medical Record), involves four major concepts or steps in developing plans for patient caret data collection, interpretation of data, intervention proposal, and evaluation. These widely inclusive concepts offer a consistent method for analyzing and solving simple or complex patient care needs and problems and can be adapted to the assessment and solution of health facility planning problems. The Weed method, when used as a facility planning tool, offers a common problem solving framework between planners and health facility personnel. Planners and health professionals would speak about the same basic concepts using the same functional thought processes and techniques. Effective communications produced by a common vocabulary and planning framework will aid the health facility planner in meeting his goal of developing responsive health care facilities. In an attempt to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of this proposed planning tool, this study utilizes the Weed method to analyze and suggest improvements for a medical school radiotherapy unit. The method consistency, adaptability, and validity become apparent by the demonstration of its multiple feedback loops and uniform analysis and problem-solving techniques.

[发布机构] Rice University