IF I RAN A HOSPITAL DESIGN FIRM - mammo day

I just read the most wonderful thing that made me want to be queen of hospitals.  In Inc.com, an article Ten Office Design Tips to Foster Creativity.  A main theme of the article is letting people be themselves and spend their days where they can be themselves and do their work their own way.

 Letting patients be themselves is perhaps one of the two things hospitals do worst. 

In one slide accompanying the article, there are lawn chairs, and people seated on the grass!  I would have risked fewer germs sitting in the grass instead of crammed in elbow to elbow on a long banquette with dozens of others in a stuffy room before my first day-surgery in L.A. county.  And I might have felt better.

Endlessly waiting in another part of the same hospital once, I had a stunning view of the elevator.

 Interviewing at Ping-Pong tables is mentioned in the Inc. article.  Supposedly it shakes interviewees out of their memorized interview speeches.    I can't think of a reason why there couldn't be Ping-Pong in the waiting area for mammograms.  A reminder that fun is supposed to be part of life?  Instead we are supposed to read quietly and remember that we're there to stay healthy, but we know damn well that the mammo unit exists only because somebody might be getting  cancer.  Otherwise it would be a fruit tasting room.

One more thing about the article:  it mentions the need for society vs the need to get off somewhere and work intensively.  Luckily, the local hospital in the main mammo waiting room has coffee and snacks, and people do chat a bit at the coffee counter.

 But if we need a little peace and quiet or privacy to digest the latest news from the umpteenth mammo film, where to go?  Hide in the ladies' room?  There is a smaller, glaring, and much less comfortable waiting room where one may try to get it together in full view of other women marching bravely toward the biopsy room.  

Who decides what these waiting rooms will be?  An interior designer who has never been called back for "more films?"  And interior designer who gets way too much input from a hospital administration that wants photo-op rooms where everyone is quiet and never cries or argues?  Kinda like detention?

I suspect I'll write or rant more on this later.