How Does the Design of Healthcare Spaces Affect the Well-being of Patients and Staff?

The interior design of your healthcare facility has a meaningful impact on everyone. Whether or not it's a positive experience depends greatly on the quality of the decisions you make. Poorly thought-out healthcare projects can negatively affect the lives of patients and staff for a very long time. Since many people spend large portions of their time in medical facilities, the psychological affects of interior design is very real to them. In light of this, we'd like to cover some principles and design concepts that, if implemented, will greatly improve the psychological quality of your healthcare facility.

Healthcare Interior Design Isn't Just Decoration

This is a common misconception – interior design is much more than just decoration. The coverings, colors, and finishes you choose are important aspects of interior design, but far from its only characteristic. A good interior designer will first seek to understand patient and staff behaviors with the aim of creating functional and aesthetically pleasing spaces. The organization of movement is a good starting point, which can be achieved through basic layout manipulation – a key building block of any facility's interior. This division of space can be accomplished through walls, but also through furniture and even the creative use of objects. But the division of space isn't the only consideration...

Use of Furniture in Healthcare Environments

Furniture has a direct influence on the quality of any interior project. And it's the designer's job to ensure that the choices specified in the project will favor the routine functioning of the space. This is especially important when it comes to busy waiting rooms and small patient rooms; attention to the choice of each piece of furniture is paramount. In these situations, it's often more effective to design unique items to make the most efficient use of each square inch. Choosing furniture that is flexible and adaptable can be great options to consider.

Strategic Layouts

Interior layouts are a powerful tool for shaping the interior of a healthcare facility. You can control the layout with the positioning of equipment, furniture, and objects. A proper distribution of these elements will organize the flow of your facility, create places of permanence, and generate hierarchies of space. In order to develop a good layout, the interior designer must, of course, consider accessibility standards, fire escape routes, and minimum dimensions for rooms. There is a vast amount of literature delineating the appropriate dimensions for each type of space use. The most essential thing to understand is, therefore, the needs of the space and its users in order to propose functional and appropriate layouts for each different scenario.

Comfort & Ergonomics

Comfort is important in a healthcare facility, and ranges from its aesthetics, to its accessibility and application of technologies or passive strategies that facilitate and improve the quality of life for its patients and staff. How is the space visually perceived when inhabiting it? Its color, brightness, depth, and height will determine if it is detected as cozy, safe, stimulating, peaceful, flexible, or just the opposite. Is it acoustically comfortable? Adequate acoustic treatment will allow doctors and nurses to easily communicate with patients without having to raise their voices. Although it may seem alien to healthcare architecture, ergonomics is the discipline that helps us design facilities that are well adapted to the physiological, anatomical, and even psychological characteristics of the inhabitants and users of each room. It constitutes the relationship between the artificial environment and the actions and behaviors of the human body and mind. Therefore, the level of success of good interior design is closely related to detailed ergonomic analysis.

Designing for Patients & Staff

In the words of Dave Alan Kopec (a specialist in the field), psychology of space is essentially "the study of human relations and behaviors within the context of the built and natural environments." And we tend to agree with him. Although a definition like this can feel overwhelming. In the end, we think it's simply about designing spaces that your patients, visitors and staff actually enjoy spending time in. If you can do that, everything else will fall into place.

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