By Healthcare Facilities Today

David Green,  retired CEO of Evergreen Retirement Community in Oshkosh, Wis. is a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Gerontological Environments (SAGE) AS the organization approached its 20-year anniversary, Green, reflected on the significant changes in long-term environments and offers a call to action for those designing environments for the senior market in a Q&A in the fall issue of Environments for Aging magazine.

Environments for Aging: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the development of long-term care environments over the next 20 years?

Green: Providers, designers, and regulators need to make some significant changes in how they approach the environmental design process. To have great long-term care environments, providers need to do comprehensive pre-architectural programming so they can clearly define for the designers and the regulators what the environment is supposed to do.

The designers need to know all the users, all the activities in which the users will engage, the desired experiences of the users in each activity, and the functional requirements to provide those experiences. The designers also need to know the core values of the provider, which should guide the design decisions. If the regulators also have this information, it may help them interpret the applications of the regulations. Convincing providers of the importance of pre-architectural programming is and will continue to be difficult, since it takes time and effort.

Read the rest of the Q&A.