Question: If you could design a room in a hospital what would it be used for? and what safety features would it have?

Simon Marchant answered on 20 Jun 2015:

Ooh, good question. It really depends on what the room was for, because there are so many different parts to a hospital and it’s impossible to say what the most important ones are! I’ve never done this before, but it would be interesting to design the rooms that CT scanners go into. CT scanners use lots of X-ray pictures to build a 3D model of a person, so they give off a lot of radiation which can be bad for you if you get too much of it (for example if you work there). So to design it, you have to make sure that nobody nearby gets irradiated and ends up like Godzilla – walls are several inches of lead, doors are set so that you can’t see the scanner from outside, and if radioactive tracer is used to see specific things inside somebody, then they need to go to the loo in a separate toilet because their pee is radioactive! Also, if the scanner is vital (if it’s used in an operation, for example) then you have to have a power supply that won’t fail, controls that won’t harm anyone if somebody makes a mistake, parts that won’t break if somebody pukes on them, etc… it’s really interesting the different things that you have to design into a room to make sure that nobody gets hurt!