Steelcase Launches Healthcare Focused Organization

Grand Rapid, MI, May 1, 2006--Steelcase Inc., announced the launch of Nurture by Steelcase, a new organization focused on the healthcare environment. "Nurture by Steelcase has a bold vision to shape and improve the future of healthcare delivery," said Michael I. Love, president, Nurture by Steelcase. "Nurture concentrates on space and environments and how products within those environments can help make them more comfortable, more efficient and more conducive to the healing process." Nurture brings a holistic viewpoint to healthcare environments and works with doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to gain valuable insight into environments that promote healing. Nurture partners with architects, designers and organizations such as Planetree and The Center for Health Care Design's Pebble Project to research and develop the best possible healthcare environment solutions. "For years we have served healthcare customers through our Steelcase family of companies. Today, Nurture enables us to provide our customers with a dedicated, single-source for our considerable research, existing product offering and new product development," said James P. Hackett, president and CEO, Steelcase Inc. "As an industry, healthcare continues to grow in size and sophistication and we look forward to serving this market aggressively and insightfully." During the past two years, members of the current Nurture team conducted ethnographic research at leading health facilities like Ascension Health, Intermountain Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Massachusetts General, Mayo Clinic and other top Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) to evaluate a wide variety of interactions in numerous healthcare environments--especially how caregivers perform their duties and how patients receive their care. "Our team digs deep to evaluate what works, and what could work better," said Love. "We ask why--and why not? And we continually come away convinced that with all of us working together, we can make healthcare better--without question." For example, Nurture is working to improve the safety of patients and efficiency of caregivers by rethinking something as simple and ubiquitous as the overbed table. "Our research at a major metropolitan hospital showed that this tiny surface is much more than a place for patients' meals--it's used by patients, by doctors, by nurses and by family members to accommodate almost everything happening in the room," said Kingshuk Das, Nurture's director of applied research. "Rethinking this table as a flexible, dual surface to address the needs of patients as well as caregivers, we have the opportunity to transform it from something that is often in the way, into an effective and versatile tool." Nurture solutions focus on making the healthcare experience better for three key groups: patients, caregivers and carepartners. Each has its own distinct needs within the healthcare environment, ranging from workflow and productivity issues to concerns about safety and privacy. "We believe the best solutions must address the unique interactions between these groups. And that's where we're convinced Nurture can really make a difference," said Love. Nurture may be a new company, but is by no means starting from scratch. The products and expertise from other Steelcase companies, with significant experience in healthcare, integrate under the Nurture umbrella to give it one of the deepest product portfolios in the business. Nurture offerings include products from the entire Steelcase family of companies-- Brayton, Designtex, Details, Metro, Polyvision, Turnstone, and Vecta. Nurture solutions, while designed to improve the healthcare experience for end users, are optimized to address the needs of facility managers, health care administrators and the architecture and design community.

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