Question

List three purposes of the inpatient therapeutic environment:

Answer 1

Healthcare facilities are designed not only to support and facilitate state of the art medicine and technology, patient safety, and quality patient care, but to also embrace the patient, family, and caregivers in a psycho socially supportive therapeutic environment. The characteristic of the physical environment in which a patient receives care affects patient outcomes, patient satisfaction, patient safety, staff efficiency, staff satisfaction, and organizational outcomes. The effects can be positive or negative.

A healthcare environment is therapeutic when it does all the supports of the clinical excellence in the treatment of the physical body. This supports the psycho social and spiritual needs of the patient, family, and staff. Produces measurable positive effects on patients clinical outcomes and staff effectiveness.

Therapeutic environments can refer to physical, social, and psychological safe spaces that are specifically designed to be healing. But most often, the term therapeutic environment refers to a physical space that is set up to allow individuals to work through and overcome medical issues.

Patients in a healthcare facility are often fearful and uncertain about their health, their safety, and their isolation from normal social relationships. The large, complex environment of a typical hospital further contributes to the stressful situation. Stress can cause a person's immune system to be suppressed, and can dampen a person's emotional and spiritual resources, impeding recovery and healing.

The application of these factors has focused on the patient and patient's family. There are recognized potential benefits for staff and caregivers in terms of satisfaction, effectiveness, and staff retention, from environmental factors. The benefits, staff receive from these environmental factors may impact the quality of care patients experience. Therapeutic Environments have proven to be cost effective by improving patient outcomes, reducing length of stay, and by enhancing staff satisfaction, recruitment, and retention of staff.

To create a therapeutic environment, all members of the design team are responsible for using the power of design to find solutions that will affect the patients and staff in positive ways, from the parking lot, approach, and entry, to the public spaces, clinical spaces, and ultimately the patient room.

The healthcare project should begin with a review of existing available literature on design interventions that are proven to improve patient outcomes, staff effectiveness and patient safety, a decision made with the users as how each one might apply to the project, what outcomes and benefits would be expected. Checklists can assist designers and users in evaluating existing conditions and in setting goals for new facilities planning and design. Design goals that are set and clearly defined at the beginning of a project which can serve as research questions to be answered by Post Occupancy Surveys, data collection, and evaluation.

Research has an important role in helping and continuing to better understand the effects of the healthcare environment, and identifying opportunities to make it an active agent for healing. A growing body of evidence is emerging from research in several fields. There are various kinds of research that are pursued. There is a Medical Model which evaluates environmental effect using biologically measurable data. The evaluation of user perception and behavior is known as Social Science Model. There is a movement toward research that embraces an organization and its facility in its entirety. This research considers several design features at once, how they interact, and how their interactions impact several patient and staff outcomes. This is phenomena is known as Holistic Model.