{"id":62099,"date":"2023-11-10T10:51:45","date_gmt":"2023-11-10T15:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/healthcaredesignmagazine.com\/?p=62099"},"modified":"2023-11-13T19:21:09","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T00:21:09","slug":"hcd-expo-2023-barbara-huelat-receives-2023-changemaker-award-reflects-on-her-career-journey-and-dementia-care-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healthcaredesignmagazine.com\/news\/hcd-expo-2023-barbara-huelat-receives-2023-changemaker-award-reflects-on-her-career-journey-and-dementia-care-work\/","title":{"rendered":"HCD Conference 2023: Barbara Huelat Receives 2023 Changemaker Award, Reflects On Her Career Journey And Dementia Care Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the 2023 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo<\/a> in New Orleans in early November, The Center for Health Design<\/a> presented its 2023 Changemaker Award to Barbara Huelat of Healing Design \u2013 Human Centric Solutions<\/a>\u00a0(Alexandria, Va.).<\/p>\n

The annual Changemaker Award honors individuals or organizations that have demonstrated the ability to change the way healthcare facilities are designed and built and whose work has had broad impact on the advancement of healthcare design.<\/p>\n

Huelat has spent her career as a\u00a0healthcare designer<\/a>, strategist, researcher, caregiver, author<\/a>, and speaker. Her portfolio of industry contributions include projects with the Mayo Clinic<\/a> (Rochester, Minn.), National Institutes of Health<\/a> (Bethesda, Md.), Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center<\/a> (Woodbridge, Va.), King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center<\/a> (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), and U.S. Department of Veterans Hospitals\u2019 Planetree<\/a> facilities.<\/p>\n

During the presentation, Huelat\u2019s daughter Sharon Pochron, associate professor at Stony Brook University<\/a> (Stony Brook, N.Y.), led a Q+A with her mother about her career path, discovery of evidence-based design, and research and work on designing for dementia patients.<\/p>\n

Huelat says her interest in healthcare design was sparked at a young age as a Brownie in Girl Scouts, where her troop gave handmade Christmas gifts to a local nursing home. \u201cI remember walking through what seemed like a human warehouse of older people and seeing their faces and blank stares. It was an image of sadness and hopelessness,\u201d she said. \u201cAs a child I wondered, \u2018Is this what happens to people when they get old?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

That experience made an impression on Huelat and fueled a desire to create healing environments that centered on patient needs to support healing.<\/p>\n

A pivotal moment in her early career that led to her passion for evidence-based design came while presenting with a big architectural firm at Hamot Hospital in Erie, Pa. \u201cI presented all my design boards and my rationale behind what I did,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThe chairman of the board got up and pounded his fist on the table and said, \u2018Don\u2019t ever talk about this stuff without proof!\u2019 I was humiliated and I said never, never, never again will I present anything without knowing why it works.\u201d<\/p>\n

During their discussion on stage, Pochron asked her mother about her personal journey with dementia care, a topic on which Huelat has written books including, most recently, \u201cTaming the Chaos of Dementia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Huelat \u00a0said that when her loved ones started aging, she learned a lot about dementia and Alzheimer\u2019s disease and became personally involved in their care. \u201cEverything I knew from a professional level, being trained as a dementia caregiver and hospice volunteer, wasn\u2019t enough to help them. I learned about the human side of what it means to take care of someone with dementia.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the personal stories Huelat recounted was about her own mother who had dementia that developed from Parkinson disease. \u201cWe reached a point where we could no longer care for her at home and found a facility for her,\u201d Huelat \u00a0said. \u201cOne day I got a call from the facility saying I had to come get my mother because she escaped and climbed a chain link fence to get out. Who knows where she was going, but she wasn\u2019t going to stay!\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the lessons learned from her research on dementia, Huelat noted that there are two sides of memory affected by dementia: the semantic or cognitive side and the empathetic or emotional side.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t fix the semantic side, there\u2019s no cure,\u201d she said. \u201cBut the emotional side is still intact. This is where design and environmental interventions have such great power in that it can transform human lives into meaningful, joyful experiences and is the magic portal into the brains of individuals living with dementia.\u201d<\/p>\n

In closing, Huelat emphasized that she has more work that she wants to accomplish. \u201cDementia caregiving, as it is today, is not sustainable. More than 62 percent of all dementia caregivers are volunteer and family caregivers, taking care of loved ones at home, without training or knowledge,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a big problem and I want a seat at the table to make a change.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Center honored Barbara Huelat for her work in healthcare design and research during a Q+A presentation at the 2023 HCD Conference in New Orleans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13604,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[528,526],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"HCD Conference 2023: Barbara Huelat Receives 2023 Changemaker Award, Reflects On Her Career Journey And Dementia Care Work","url":"http:\/\/healthcaredesignmagazine.com\/news\/hcd-expo-2023-barbara-huelat-receives-2023-changemaker-award-reflects-on-her-career-journey-and-dementia-care-work\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/healthcaredesignmagazine.com\/news\/hcd-expo-2023-barbara-huelat-receives-2023-changemaker-award-reflects-on-her-career-journey-and-dementia-care-work\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Awards + Events","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Tracey Walker"}],"creator":["Tracey Walker"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"HCD Magazine","logo":""},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2023-11-10T15:51:45Z","datePublished":"2023-11-10T15:51:45Z","dateModified":"2023-11-14T00:21:09Z"},"rendered":"