Healthcare

The Center for Health Design is providing free, at the web address noted below, an interactive rendering highlighting key research that can be applied during the design of treatment rooms in emergency departments.  As noted on the website on which the diagram appears, “Two goals are often at the center of current care models for mental or behavioral health: safety and healing. In the Emergency Department, design has traditionally focused on safety for both patients and staff through checklists for ligature-resistance.

Gore and colleagues studied the effects of seeing art on anxiety among cancer patients.  They report that they compared anxiety levels for “three groups (participants who observed an electronic selection of artwork with and without guided discussion, and a control group that did not engage in either dedicated art observation activity).  . . .  [average] anxiety scores were significantly lower among those who participated in guided art observation, compared to [the  control group]. . . .

Cui and teammates probed how the design of outdoor spaces at hospitals can influence staff stress levels.  They found that “several [previously conducted] studies have revealed that even short-term exposure to outdoor space has a decompression effect. . . . [in the study conducted by the Cui lead group] EEG measurement equipment was utilized to obtain the value of β wave (vβw) that represents the stress and anxiety of staff in three different outdoor spaces: open, traffic, and rest. . . . The proportion of natural elements, such as landscape . . . and waterscape . . .