Using stress-reducing designs in healthcare facilities
Updated: 15 January 2013 | By ROGER S. Ulrich
Psychiatric care patients and staff may soon experience architectural designs that reduce noise and crowding in mental health facilities.
These designs aim to minimize stress, which often leads to aggression – the main reason the latter should be implemented. Environmental psychologists now have a clearer understanding of architectural features that can offer calming distractions that reduce trauma. This is thanks to the decades of study on the design of apartments, prisons, cardiac intensive care units and offices. |
Stress faced by patients and staffPatients currently face stress, which is intensified by the trauma of being confined in wards, especially when the ward is noisy and lacks privacy.
Communication is also hindered between the staff and patients. |
Improvements that can be made:
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Some of the improvements do increase building cost, but is offset by the reduced trauma for the patients and staff, particularly when the incidences of violence have gone up. Consequences of violence like medical care and lawsuits are expensive, too.
Violence does not only take place in wards
Aggressive behaviour in emergency rooms and other departments is common. A crowded waiting room, fixed rows of seats and a blaring television is sufficient to make the patient feel stressed.
Environments like these increase the chances of violence by patients or family members to staff or other people.
Environments like these increase the chances of violence by patients or family members to staff or other people.
Other efforts like improving staff training and care procedures and identifying potentially aggressive patients have been made.
In the long run, there may be a lower cost for care.
In the long run, there may be a lower cost for care.