Bringing Hospitals to Life: Design Quality Standards
Tye Farrow
Senior Partner, Farrow Partnership Architects
Bringing Hospitals to Life : Design Quality Standards (Click here to download full paper)
For over twenty-five years, references to “patient-focused care” and “healing environments” have been in common use by hospital administrators and healthcare design professionals. Such terms reflect admirable intentions to provide psychosocially supportive environments. However we continue to see stress-inducing spaces that demonstrate little empathy for the fragile emotional state of patients, family and staff. In current practice, narrow focus on technical specifications typically overshadows the need to clearly articulate quality-of-place standards.
This paper presents a series of case study examples that demonstrate how to set and implement such standards for design. The paper also raises a concern that the use of vague, unchallenged terms such as “healing environment” have had an unintentional consequence: complacency with regard to designing spaces that truly support health.
As a first step in creating more meaningful standards for quality of design, the inherent challenges of describing and monitoring intangibles are laid out. The methodology draws on research by Harvard biologist E O Wilson indicating that an innate human desire for close contact with the natural world occurs on a physical, emotional and intellectual level. Wilson describes this affinity as “the connections that human beings sub-consciously seek with the rest of life.
The need to connect with nature, therefore, constitutes an evidence-based foundation for developing robust design principles and guidelines. The objective of the paper is to raise awareness for the need to clearly articulate standards that are anchored in biophilia research, as well as to highlight what is possible in the quest to connect with nature.
The methods used include examining living international examples of how to work with the power of nature, rather than attempting to work against these forces. Three survey questions are proposed as a significant addition to standard patient surveys that focus solely on concerns for communication and cleanliness.
Results
This paper lays out a research-based, widely applicable approach to setting standards for quality of design that can be implemented as rigorously as technical standards.
Conclusions
Lack of progress in creating meaningful standards for quality of design is linked to
1) failing to challenge what constitutes a “healing environment”;
2) sidestepping the challenge of monitoring intangibles; and
3) belief that technical standards alone are sufficient to ensure a psychosocially supportive health environment.
These challenges can be addressed by realising what is possible in terms of design standards, then engaging stakeholders in a dialogue to hone these standards.
Keywords: design quality, health development, intangibles
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