Pamela James Blumgart

For the last 23 years, Pamela James Blumgart has brought forward many ideas for the editing, design, layout, and committee structure of the Guidelines and the Facility Guidelines Institute. In 1998, as an employee of the American Institute of Architects, Pamela took on the role of associate editor of the 2001 edition of the Guidelines. Working with the 97-person committee, she quickly began to put her mark on the design and style of the document.

For the 2006 edition, Pamela was challenged by the FGI Board to work with board member and Health Guidelines Revision Committee Steering Committee member Martin Cohen, FAIA, FACHE, to totally reorganize the document content with a new structure, layout, and look. She excelled at this task and for the 2010 edition, she was named senior editor. For this cycle, she worked with Skip Gregory, NCARB, to standardize the numbering of support areas and location terminology in the Guidelines. For the next cycle, she took her Guidelines role to the American Society for Health Care Engineering, where she continued her influence over the process of revising future Guidelines and associated documents along with managing the editing of Patient Handling and Movement Assessments: A White Paper. Pamela’s skills were also challenged in 2015 when FGI decided to split the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospital and Outpatient Facilities into two documents for the 2018 edition.

Without Pamela’s tireless attention to detail, her passion, and her dedication as FGI’s managing editor through the 2018 edition, the Guidelines documents would have fallen short of the stellar documents the health care industry has come to expect.

During her tenure as editor, Pamela has overseen the transformation of the Guidelines from a loosely organized 142-page document into the most widely respected standard for planning, design, and construction of hospitals, outpatient facilities, and residential health, care, and support facilities.

Pamela’s unsurpassed attention to detail is matched only by her commitment to improving the Guidelines documents. With warmth and wit, she has provided editorial guidance to the hundreds of architects, engineers, facility managers, authorities having jurisdiction, and health care professionals who have participated in the Health Guidelines Revision Committee, as well as other members of the FGI staff.