It can be stressful and time-consuming for patients and visitors to become accustomed to navigating large, unfamiliar hospitals, and so an architecture researcher tested a simple remedy: to let nature in with the use of indoor greenspaces and large windows.
Research conducted by West Virginia University’s associate professor Shan Jiang showed that introducing nature into large hospitals can humanise the institutional environment and reduce the stress of patients, visitors and healthcare providers.
Prof Jiang made use of immersive virtual environments for a controlled experiment that asked participants to complete various wayfinding tasks in a simulated hospital.
Though participants saw the same layout, one group encountered large windows and nature views among the corridor walls. The control group meanwhile saw solid walls without any daylight or views of nature, more like a typical modern hospital. Participants in the greenspace group used shorter time and walked less distance to complete wayfinding tasks.
“In terms of spatial orientation and wayfinding, window views of nature and small gardens can effectively break down the tedious interiors of large hospital blocks,” Prof Jiang said, “and serve as landmarks to aid people’s wayfinding and improve their spatial experience.”
In the greenspace group, participants’ mood states, particularly anger and confusion, were also found to be “significantly relieved”.
Prof Jiang’s findings are published in the Health Environments Research and Design Journal.
Based on prior research, it’s estimated that a patient or hospital visitor must go through at least seven steps in the wayfinding process to arrive at the final destination. WVU’s Center for Health Design cites wayfinding issues as an environmental stressor and a concerning topic in healthcare design.
Prof Jiang said that she was prompted to do the study by those factors, coupled with her own personal experiences (her family members have worked in healthcare) and others’ accounts of feeling lost in hospitals.
“Large hospitals can be visually welcoming but the functionality and internal circulation are indeed complex and confusing,” she said.
Greenspaces positioned at key decision points, such as main corridors or junctions, can help improve navigation.
With a background in landscape architecture, Jiang has been interested in the immediate surroundings of people in a smaller scope, particularly the indoor-outdoor relationship and the boundaries between architecture and landscapes.
Gardens and plants also tend to have strong therapeutic effects on people, she found.
“You may explain such therapeutic effects from multiple perspectives: people’s colour/hue preferences tend to range from blue to green, nature and plants are positive distractions that could restore people’s attentional fatigue, and human beings could have developed genetic preference of greenery from evolutionary perspectives,” Prof Jiang said. “All mechanisms together contribute to the positive experience when looking at gardens and nature views.”
Prof Jiang noted that many European hospitals have successfully integrated “hospital in a park” concepts. In the United States, the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in California has patios and window nooks in every patient room, and most rooms have direct views of a large healing garden, she said. The Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in the UK was literally built in a park.
Source: West Virginia University
