Healing Environment or Healthy Environment?
I was looking at the brochure for the CleanMed conference today, which is next month in Pittsburgh. The tag line for the conference this year is “Creating Healing Environments.”
I find it interesting that the conference organizers have used the term “healing environments” to describe environmentally sustainable practices for healthcare. Our definition of healing environments (developed by healthcare designer Jain Malkin more than 10 years ago) is:
“A healing environment is a physical setting that supports patients and families through stress imposed by illness, hospitalization, medical visits, recovery, and sometimes, bereavement.”
Wouldn’t it make more sense to call an environmentally responsible environment a “healthy environment”? Do sustainable practices actually foster healing or health? I guess you could say that sustainable practices can help reduce stress for patients, families, and staff, but a healing environment is much more than just an environmentally responsible one.
In fact, design interventions to create healing environments can be linked to the Institute of Medicine’s six specific aims for improvement that were outlined in its 2001 report: safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable. I would argue that environmental sustainability belongs in the “efficient” and “safe” categories.
Using “creating healing environments” to describe the CleanMed conference muddies the waters for those who are trying to understand the concept. Clearly, it is much bigger than just sustainability and hopefully this will be explained by the presentors at the conference.