Beyond Basics: Better Practices and Pitfalls for Behavioral Health
Discover how the VA Inpatient Mental Health Design Guide’s room templates, planning diagrams, and clinical models can help you design behavioral health spaces that balance safety with dignity, recovery, and caregiver needs.
About the live course
Mental and behavioral health is an often stigmatized and misunderstood area of healthcare design. Too often, safety comes at the expense of serenity, risk reduction is prioritized over recovery, and spaces described as deinstitutionalized still miss opportunities to advance dignity through design.
This course introduces better practices for inpatient mental health planning and design for professionals ranging from emerging practitioners to senior medical planners. Participants will explore the VA Inpatient Mental Health Design Guide, a resource of more than 500 pages containing over 30 room templates, planning diagrams, and detailed discussion of the clinical models that influence behavioral health environments. The program will demonstrate how thoughtful planning and design decisions can balance safety, dignity, recovery, and caregiver needs.
- Compare mental and behavioral health planning approaches and explain how they support patient recovery, dignity, and well-being.
- Identify safety, operational, and environmental constraints affecting the planning of inpatient psychiatric facilities.
- Analyze behavioral health unit design challenges and select planning solutions that reduce risk while supporting patients and caregivers.
- Apply guidance from the VA Inpatient Mental Health Design Guide to improve safety, therapeutic outcomes, and the human experience in mental health facilities.
Presented in partnership with the Academy of Architecture for Health (AAH).
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