Healing Views

Hospitals by nature, can be scary and depressing places. But they don’t have to be.  There is ample evidence that aesthetics matter to patient’s health and can contribute to a speedy recovery.

To test the theory, University Medical Center of Princeton mocked up two different patient rooms.  The first has a nice view, a sofa for guests and no roommates.  The results of the experiment proved that patients asked for 30% less pain medication as compared to patients in double occupied rooms with no view or homey accommodations. This result shouldn’t be surprising.

The seminal study on the subject was published in 1984 – that’s right, 30 years ago – in Science. Roger S. Ulrich, now an architecture professor at the Center for Healthcare Building Research at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden after many years at Texas A&M University, compared two groups of patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in the same hospital, matching patients for characteristics such as age and obesity that might affect their recovery.

One group looked out on some trees while the other faced a brick wall; their rooms were otherwise almost the same. Patients with a view of the trees required significantly less high-powered pain medication and left the hospital earlier, after 7.96 days versus 8.70.

Thirty years of follow-up research later, and its still news when someone designs a hospital room with a view.

Evidence Based Design techniques are helping to improve health care environments.  Architects, designers and hospital administrators are working together to make new hospitals and renovations more inviting to patients, their families and to care givers.

Article Source: Virginia Postrel – 2014, Bloomberg News. See the original post here.