Hospital design: how to build a place where the body heals faster

Two weeks ago, I had to go to the hospital for a minor surgical procedure. Nothing too serious but I found myself in a medical environment that I fortunately don't have to find myself in on a regular basis. And as I was sitting in the waiting room, I started observing my surroundings and myself. What happened? I had to wait in a narrow corridor with no natural light that felt like it had no ending. And as I was sitting there, I felt my mood drop. I wasn't looking forward to my procedure but also not dreading it, but I started to feel less healthy by the minute. To take my mind off things I started thinking about an interesting challenge:

How do you design a hospital where the body heals faster? And how might these insights serve us beyond this one case?

It sent me back to a study I have cited for years. In 1984, the researcher Roger Ulrich published work in ‘Science’ comparing patients recovering from the same gallbladder operation in the same hospital. The only systematic difference was the view from the bed. Some rooms looked onto a small stand of trees, others onto a brick wall. The patients who could see the trees recovered measurably better, leaving hospital sooner, needing fewer strong painkillers, and drawing fewer negative notes from nurses.

The body was healing to the view, not just the medicine. No room is neutral.

Sit with how strange that is. We tend to think the environment touches our mood and stops there, and that the body is a separate, more serious matter governed by biology. Ulrich showed the line is not so clean. The view reached past mood and into recovery itself, into pain and healing time, with no act of will from the patient. No one decided to heal faster. The room did its work regardless. The lesson reaches well beyond hospitals.

Any space where people recover, concentrate or feel safe is making a continuous argument to their nervous system, all day, whether you designed it to or not.

The waiting room, the classroom, the office. This is what Behavioural Design keeps finding. The body is not separate from the room it sits in. Change the room, and you change the person in it. So how do you make that argument the right one? Here are three practical moves:

• Point the chair at something living. When you lay out a desk, a meeting room or a waiting area, ask what it faces. A window, a tree, a plant in the line of sight is not decoration, it is part of how people perform and recover. Turn the seat toward the view.

• Treat daylight as a resource, not a luxury. Give the desks and rooms where people need to focus or recover the best natural light you have, and save the windowless spaces for storage and equipment, not for the people you want at their best.

• Audit one space for what it tells the body. Pick a space where people are meant to focus, recover or do their best thinking, an office, a meeting room, a clinic, and read it the way Ulrich read those wards. Light, view, greenery, a sense of enclosure. Change the weakest one.

I left the hospital rid of a molar and a jaw infection, and while I admit I was feeling quite sorry for myself, I decided to spend the rest of the day sitting on our couch, looking at the tree in front of our house. I am all for empirical research. And all for healing, as a matter of fact.