ABSTRACT
This information, however, is not to be seen as prescriptive, as, in this sense, it extends the work of Christopher Alexander’s seminal pattern language work of nearly thirty years ago.2 No magic formulas, therefore, are to be found in this compendium for determining the optimal number of beds, as if one might simply look up some statistic in a manual.3 Suffice to say, small PCUs in acute care or specialty hospitals may have as few as four beds, and up to thirty or more in a single unit. Freestanding hospices range in bed capacity from small (8-12 beds) to moderate (12-24 beds) to large, with some housing forty or more beds for inpatient care. Observations such as these may be gleaned from the study of the continuing fluidity of the state of the art as new hospice programs are created around the world. The efforts of some governments, such as that of Australia, to standardize palliative care setting minimum deign standards, have been noteworthy, and such efforts are indeed praiseworthy.4 Similarly, hundreds of interviews and correspondences over the course of the past three years with architects who have designed hospices have greatly influenced the information presented below.5
