If you're establishing a day stay surgery unit for oral surgery or skin excision services, your facility must meet recognised clinical, quality, and safety standards, particularly if you want Southern Cross affiliated provider or other funder approval.
Editor's note: We would like to thank Victoria Aliprantis from VIC Consulting for her invaluable contribution to this article.
Several standards govern the design and build of day stay surgery facilities in New Zealand:
Mandatory regulatory requirements must be met. Other guidance and accepted practice are applied using risk-based judgement that reflects service scope, patient risk, and site or layout constraints. The Australasian Health Facility Guidelines (HPU 270) are not mandatory but are widely used as best practice to inform healthcare design decisions.
Clinical spaces need to support safe care, efficient workflows, and the realities of day-to-day operation. The sections below highlight common design considerations.
The size of your procedure room depends on the complexity of services you plan to provide:
Each room needs to house the procedure table, anaesthetic equipment, instrument trolleys, monitoring equipment, and surgical lighting, while allowing staff to move safely and efficiently.
The layout should enable clear access to the patient from all sides and provide adequate space for emergency situations and support routine documentation, equipment set-up and administrative tasks carried out during procedures.
Day stay surgery facilities require staged recovery spaces to manage patients safely from immediately post-procedure through to discharge:
Recovery design should also consider privacy and discharge pathways, including how patients exit the facility safely and are supported back to vehicles or transport.
Undersized recovery areas create bottlenecks that limit daily procedure capacity, so careful planning based on your projected patient volumes and procedure types is important.
Reprocessing facilities are a common pressure point for both operations and audits if they are not well designed.
Where reusable medical devices are used, the design needs to support reprocessing in line with AS 5369:2023. This includes clear separation between dirty, clean, and sterile workflows, with a unidirectional flow of instruments that is obvious in both layout and day-to-day practice. Depending on service size, this may be achieved through separate rooms or clearly defined zones.
For smaller day stay facilities with one or two procedure rooms, reprocessing areas are often around 15–20 m² depending on instrument volumes, case mix, and throughput.
Beyond clinical areas, your day stay surgery requires adequate support spaces:
Building services need to support safe care, staff comfort, and reliable day-to-day operation. Plant and equipment placement also needs early consideration because location of HVAC plant, compressors, vacuum systems, and other services can affect noise, heat, maintenance access, and compliance with building and council requirements.
HVAC design for procedure rooms needs to reflect procedure risk, equipment load, and expected throughput. HVAC is a major cost item so getting it right upfront matters.
Key considerations typically include:
Reprocessing areas generate heat from autoclaves and may produce fumes from cleaning agents and sterilisation processes, requiring dedicated ventilation.
Recovery areas similarly need adequate fresh air supply and comfort cooling to support patient recovery.
Medical gas outlets must be provided at each procedure bay and recovery space:
These systems require installation by licensed gas fitters and must be tested and certified before the facility can operate.
Patient treatment areas are generally designed as body-protected electrical environments, in line with AS/NZS 3000.
You will need to consider:
Procedure rooms typically need 12-16 double power outlets around the room perimeter, with additional ceiling-mounted outlets if you're using pendant systems. Placement will depend on room layout and use.
Contemporary healthcare architecture also requires robust IT infrastructure:
Infection prevention is a core consideration in the design of day stay facilities and the physical environment should support safe care, minimise contamination risk, and enable good practice to be consistently followed.
You need to think about how people, equipment, instruments, and waste move through the space. The physical layout should support clear separation between clean and dirty activities across the facility, not just within reprocessing areas. Clean supplies, used instruments, and waste should not cross unnecessarily.
Hand hygiene placement should reflect workflow and provide easy access at key points of care. Hand hygiene stations need to be positioned to support workflow and timely hand hygiene, without introducing splash or contamination risks into clean or clinical areas or requiring staff to move through other spaces to access them. The standards specify required intervals for handwashing facilities based on the layout and workflow patterns.
Surface finishes in clinical areas must be impervious, easily cleaned, and durable. Procedure rooms typically use:
Porous materials, complicated junctions, and surfaces that harbour bacteria should be avoided throughout clinical areas.
Storage design must maintain sterile supplies in climate-controlled conditions, separated from potential contaminants. The layout and environmental controls in storage areas directly affect the sterility assurance of your instrument inventory.
When planning a day stay facility, patient admission and access need to be considered alongside clinical design. This includes how patients arrive, where and how they are admitted, and how they move through the service before and after procedures.
Admission areas should support privacy, dignity, and efficient processing, particularly where patients are fasting, anxious, or recovering from sedation. Clear separation between admission, clinical, and discharge flows helps reduce congestion and supports patient safety.
Practical access matters. Adequate patient parking, drop-off zones, and proximity to entrances are important, particularly for services providing sedation or anaesthesia. Consider how patients will be escorted on arrival and departure, including accessibility requirements.
Meeting day stay surgery standards requires careful planning and experienced professional input. The complexity of requirements across clinical design, building services, and infection control makes specialist knowledge valuable from the earliest stages of your project.
We specialise in the design and build for procedural services throughout New Zealand. Our team understands the standards that apply to dental surgery and day stay facilities, and we can guide you through the design process to create a space that meets certification requirements while supporting efficient clinical operations.
From initial space planning through to equipment specification and certification support, we work with practitioners to deliver end-to-end projects that work both clinically and commercially. Get in touch to discuss your project and how we can help ensure your medical project meets the required standards from day one.