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Healthy Lighting
By Milena Simeonova

Research findings support that the design of the built environment influences patient outcomes, staff satisfaction, and cost-efficiency. With the current capital shortage for hospitals and health systems, and the need of these facilities to attract and retain patients, this becomes even more important than ever.

Then a basic question for me is: What part of the built environment is lighting? Research states that 80% of the surrounding information reaches the brain through seeing. The percentage approximation will not change the fact that lighting is of vital importance to what the patient sees and to how the patient perceives the healthcare environment.

On a deeper human level is the question: How can lighting bring health to the healthcare environment? Just as good fruits come from good trees, health for patients comes from a healthy environment.

What constitutes a healthy environment? A healthy environment is the up-lifting, "feel happy, don't know why" type of environment, that encourages patients to become proactive in their healing process.

Lighting is a major part of a healthy environment. It can remind patients of nature. It can provide continuous subtle modulations through color and brightness. By acknowledging the presence of the patient, lighting can relate to the needs of the body. It also can be synchronized with patients' circadian rhythms.

More than just healthy lighting, a healthy environment is created in the thoughtful integration between lighting and an array of auditory, fragrance, and other sensory experiences.

Do we have the means to create this healthy lighting and to improve the healthcare environment? Yes, if Peter Erskine can bring the rainbow down to earth (Puente Hills Mall City of Industry, CA, 1997), and James Carpenter can dress the walls in a colored light mesh (Christian Theological Seminary Indianapolis, IN, 1987), then we, too, can create the healthy healthcare environment.

The rapidly developing lighting technology of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) offers unlimited opportunities of lighting subtleties, modulations, and colors. The opportunities to control the lighting effects and even involve patients in proactive design of their spaces are also unlimited.

However, it is important to keep the human approach during the design process and to continuously seek support from nature's patterns. Uncontrolled use of heavy saturated colors of light on big surfaces can be unhealthy. Failure to synchronize with circadian rhythms or expose patients to light modulations of excessive amplitude and/or frequencies also can create an unhealthy environment. Adding a layer of luminance to colored lights, will bring depth and vitality to the colors.

All people are influenced by light and colors. A healthy person experiences a continuous sequence of occurring changes in the environment that continuously stimulate the brain. In extreme cases of environments depleted of colors, moving through this environment still provides some stimulation through changes in perspective of surrounding objects, their arrangement, depth planes, texture, and light gradient.

Patients who are weak, undergoing treatment, or lying immobilized in bed, are the most vulnerable group. They can look at the same ceiling, same walls, and same lights for hours, if not for weeks. Healthcare designer and author Jain Malkin describes these patients as "deprived of sensory experiences." The lighting in the patient's room is static in intensity and in radiated wavelengths. The message of a static lighting is of a "dead" environment.

To stimulate the patient's proactive self-healing, a room should convey the message of hope and life. This can be done by incorporating lighting that changes subtly and "naturally" right there, right at this very moment. Lighting with colors that awake the senses and strengthen the spirit.

Let there be light, a healthy human light.

Milena Simeonova is an architect and lighting designer in Troy, NY. She can be reached at milenasime@aol.com.