File This Under Things That Don’t Make Sense
Clare Cooper Marcus, Professor Emerita of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley and co-author of the book Healing Gardens came to The Center today to talk to us about the healing power of gardens in medical settings.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing Clare speak, you’ve missed out. She’s extremely smart, yet very approachable and easy to understand. Plus, she has some great stories to tell.
I was interested to learn from her research that staff are statistically the heaviest users of outside gardens in hospitals - most patients are in and out too quickly and those that aren’t are often too sick to get outside. For hospital staff the gardens are a breath of fresh air (literally) and a welcome relief from the intensity of their jobs. One staffer told Clare that without the garden at her place of work she might go “insane.”
Amazingly, Clare’s found that many hospitals she’s visited have outdoor garden spaces that are not sign posted well, so they are difficult to find. Some are even locked so that they can’t be used. For some reason, the hospitals don’t seem to want people to be using them. She doesn’t know why this is but has some possible theories - perhaps the hospital wishes to minimize maintenance costs or keep homeless people away.
Given how staff satisfaction and stress relief is just as important as patient outcomes when it comes to the bottom line for hospitals, the cost of good signage, upkeep or security patrol for an existing garden space seems very minor compared to the immeasurable benefit it could provide.
To all you facility planners out there I ask this: why not make sure your gardens are open, easily accessible and locatable? It’s a small and simple thing that you can do that will pay the hospital back in spades.
