Hospitals Don't Have to Be Ugly
No, this isn't a spa. It's a design for a outpatient oncology center, created by Wirt Design as a contest entry at Neocon West (an interior design trade show, not a gathering of policy wonks). I saw it there and, like many other attendees, voted it a winner.
After all, why shouldn't an outpatient oncology center look like a spa? Chemotherapy is unpleasant enough already without requiring patients to be treated in depressing, ugly surroundings. "The space responds to basic human needs for patients by providing comfort, convenience and safety," says the Wirt Design website. The space also provides beauty, a bit of pleasure in unpleasant circumstances. (For a better look at the space, see the Wirt Design page.)
Of course, that's just a theoretical design, cooked up for a contest. This NYT feature reports on the trend toward incorporating aesthetics into health care environments:
If there is one universal truth about hospitals, it is that they are drab, dismal places, not at all designed to soothe and heal.
The furniture is industrial-grade, cookie-cutter. Lights are fluorescent and harsh. Noise, according to one recent study, can reach jackhammer proportions. Windows open onto concrete jumbles. And then there is the smell of antiseptic infused with cafeteria grub that inspires in visitors a kind of anti-madeleine moment.
But a sprinkling of architects and designers around the world are working to greatly change hospitals by humanizing their design, a concept that is slowly gaining influence in Europe and the United States.
The idea is obvious: Build inviting, soothing hospitals, graced with soft lighting, inspiring views, single rooms, curved corridors, relaxing gardens and lots of art, and patients will heal quicker, nurses will remain loyal to their employers and doctors will perform better.
"The environment of a hospital contributes to the therapy of the patients," said Tony Monk, a British architect who specializes in health care design and recently published a glossy book called "Hospital Builders" (Academy Press).
"People are happy to be there, to help themselves to get better," he said. "People are mentally vulnerable when they come in, and if they are beaten down by an awful, dreadful, concrete, uninteresting, poor building with poor colors, it makes them even worse."
You have to be pretty obtuse to define hospital "function" without paying any attention to how the environment makes patients feel--but that's exactly how hospitals have historically viewed the problem. Aside from the sheer ugliness of most health care environments, lots of them are also extremely confusing to navigate, adding that extra dollop of stress that patients and their loved ones so need and want.
This may be yet another case in which the disconnect between consumers (patients) and payers (insurance companies and the government) distorts health care provision.