Tucson Medical Center

Overview

Tucson Medical Center is an acute & long-term care facility in Tucson, Arizona. The facility is a single-story, 600 bed hospital. In its original deed donation as a tuberculosis sanitarium, the facility was limited to one story as a part of the Covenants, Codes and Restrictions for the property usage. As a result, the entire 5 acre campus has a vehicular orientation.

Project Scope

In most healthcare facilities, ingress and egress is somewhat centralized, with the frequent exception of emergency and outpatient services. At TMC, there are separate entrances and parking areas for emergency, outpatient services, day surgery, maternity, OB/GYN, inpatient registration, urgent care, administration, and pediatrics.

This is significant for campus wayfinding in two ways. Initially, the first-time visitors must make decisions from their vehicle instead of on foot. So, if misinformed or confused, they can make mistakes of far larger significance because of the required travel mode and distance to verify their choices. Additionally, since it is possible to travel a considerable distance within the hospital and end up leaving through a different exit, orientation, both within and outside of the facility, is critical.

The old signage attempted to solve the problem by listing every destination on every sign. Most signs had 12-15 listings, all of similar emphasis and size. The signs were virtually useless since they displayed far more information than can reasonably be processed from behind the wheel of a car (See photo to the right).

The new exterior signage relies on a geographic characteristic of the campus and the City of Tucson for orientation. Tucson is similar to Albuquerque in that the points of the compass are familiar tools of reference for the community. Additionally, the TMC campus has its most important entry points at the Southeast, Southwest, Northeast, and Northwest regions of the site.

However, those terms alone are not memorable enough to be reliable wayfinding tools. The ideas needed to be graphically supported to be effective. Additionally, since there are many satellite facilities and medical offices on campus, a distinction needed to be made between campus areas and points within the main hospital structure. Finally, specific orientation is needed within the parking areas so that the "carfinding" process is a little easier.

So, a slightly different set of symbols was developed to create consistent but distinct differences between external areas of the campus and the interior of the hospital. Information overload was clearly a problem with all of the current directional signs, so the symbols were used to create a hierarchy of information. This limited the amount of relevant destinations to those that are in the immediate area. (See images below.) Each area has its own directory, so orientation can occur in any region of the campus.