If given the opportunity to redesign a standard doctor’s office I would focus on removing the office feeling from the equation all together. I do not believe an inorganic compartmentalized environment is conducive to promoting health or good health communication. Rather then a large commercial space compartmentalized into different rooms I would like for the experience to be more like visiting a small park or garden. I imagine having a dirt path entry leading up to the main doctor’s bungalow. This main bungalow would house important medical supplies and be the head doctor’s central command. Branching off in different directions from the main bungalow would be five meandering footpaths leading to small ‘camps’, each with their own open air bamboo house. Upon arrival patients would be directed to a numbered camp where they could place their things. While waiting to hangout and forage medicinal plants with the doctor patients could walk barefooted in the grass, eat wild fruits, and explore the gardens. There would be no feelings of being rushed through and patients would be welcomed to stay for as long as they please.
This medical assessment park would be heavily landscaped with medicinal and edible plants. The entry way, road in, all the path ways and each camp would be themed medical gardens. All with specific treatment purposes and grown in viable amounts. Encouraging patients to explore the gardens barefooted in the grass would help promote good health communication. Rather then the doctor all of a sudden opening the door and barging in on you in a tiny room, in this setting the doctor would also be barefooted and would arrive from wondering down a meandering path from his previous patient’s camp. The doctor with his or her experienced eye could achieve a better initial assessment of the patient through better verbal and non verbal health communication, facilitated by the environment. Although most often not needed, if the doctor felt the need to sit the patient down or do further physical examination the bamboo house at each camp could facilitate this. Each bamboo house, while being open air would be protected from the elements and contain the necessary supplies that any regular doctors waiting room would have.
Treatments at the medical park would be homeopathically centered. All the necessary emergency medical supplies and personal training would be in place for all foreseeable medical emergencies. Should anything serious happen the staff facilities would be primed for optimal and state of the art care. The focus would be on the use of plant medicines in their natural unrefined state before resulting to more allopathic treatments. Rather then teaching patients how to take pills the doctor, a medicinal plant expert and botanist would teach patients about their ails while showing them how to harvest, re-propagate and make use of the plant materials needed for their recommended medicine. In this way patients would learn to understand their health problems, their source, and how to more easily correct and prevent them. This dynamic understand would reverberate positive health communication through the community and eventually generations.
Given the opportunity to redesign a standard doctor’s office what you do?