THE ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES PERSPECTIVE ON HOSPITAL ROOM DESIGN: A MIXED-METHODS APPROACH Emily S. Patterson Division of Health Information Management and Systems School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA Elizabeth Sanders Department of Design, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA Carolyn M. Sommerich Department of Integrated Systems Engineering, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA Kevin D. Evans Division of Radiologic Sciences and Therapy School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA Steven A. Lavender Department of Integrated Systems Engineering and Orthopaedics, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA Jing Li Department of Integrated Systems Engineering, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA Columbus, Ohio, USA Our aim is to enhance the safety and efficiency of all healthcare staff by designing patient rooms that meet the physical and cognitive needs of those providing direct and indirect patient care in hospital settings. A mixed-methods study was employed, where findings were compiled from twenty-six environmental services personnel across study activities. The insights were grouped into six categories of challenges with the design of hospital rooms in acute care settings: room cleaning, bathroom, room size, furniture, communication, and a miscellaneous ‘other’ category. There are design implications for storage, room design features, locations of room items, and fabrics and finishes. INTRODUCTION Our aim is to enhance the safety and efficiency of all healthcare staff by designing patient rooms that meet the physical and cognitive needs of all stakeholder groups who work in hospital patient rooms on a daily basis. Until recently, there has been only limited published input on patient room design from ergonomics specialists based upon research eliciting the needs of primarily registered nurses (France et al., 2005, Hignett and Lu, 2007, Hignett & Evans, 2006, Gallant & Lanning, 2001). In an extensive systematic review, interventions to reduce the risk of infections with environmental services personnel ranged from organizational design, guidelines, education, training, and auditing approaches. In this review, optimum ergonomics was identified as an important factor, and specifically was defined as having easy availability of alcohol-based hand rub at the point of care and sinks stocked with soap and single-use towels (Zingg et al., 2015). Although there is currently no evidence to support that single rooms reduce infections, there is an increased use of single rooms for this purpose in new designs and remodeling efforts and the available evidence suggests that environmental service costs are higher with single rooms (Maben et al., 2015). Surprisingly, there are no known studies or interventions related to identifying and meeting the physical or cognitive needs of environmental services personnel during cleaning tasks beyond supporting hygiene control in the same way as for other personnel who enter, work in, and exit the hospital patient room. In this paper, we make an initial step to fill this gap in the literature through an exploratory study. We ask the question: What aspects of the patient room design make cleaning challenging for environmental services personnel to do comfortably, easily, and efficiently? Copyright 2017 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved. 10.1177/2327857917061023 Proceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care 104