Doorless Design Puts Patients at Ease

Receiving radiation therapy for cancer treatment can be daunting. The technology is large and intimidating; the treatments are highly complex.. Add to that the feeling of being sealed in a vault as the 3000-pound doors of the suite close to avoid radiation leakage, and it’s a pretty claustrophobic situation. At the Lacks Cancer Center at Saint Mary’s Health Care, that isn’t the case.

Tewfik Bichay, Ph.D., Director of Medical Physics at Saint Mary’s, was aware of this problem when he was working on the design of the radiation oncology area of the new Lacks Cancer Center, and so he designed a “doorless entry” to the suite. “My major motivator was to address patient anxiety about the feeling of being ‘alone and entombed’ in a treatment room behind a massive door,” said Bichay. “Our patients now feel that they are simply walking down an open hallway to receive their treatment.”

Tewfik Bichay, Ph.D., describes how his doorless entry design works: