Insights & Solutions

This webinar will present an overview of the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center garden research project. For this project, The Center for Health Design awarded Legacy Health and Quatrefoil, Inc. its 2018 Evidence-Based Design Touchstone Award at the highest Platinum Level. Attendees will gain an understanding of the impact of an evidence-based design (EBD) process to create a hospital garden to reduce stress in three different user groups, learn the positive effects of a garden on different hospital populations, and see how the garden is used in daily programming to serve all hospital populations.

Nejati, A., Shepley, M., Rodiek, S., & Lee, C. (2016). Restorative Design Features for Hospital Staff Break Areas: A Multi-Method Study. Health Environments Research & Design Journal, 9(2), 16-35.

As part of the noise toolbox, in this issue brief you will learn about how excessive noise can negatively impact patients and staff in the hospital environment, ways to improve patients’ perception of sound, and low-cost, medium-cost, and high-cost design strategies that can reduce noise.

From heightened anxiety and stress, to medical errors, to staff burnout, to HIPAA violations, that hospital noise is pandemic is well known. Ongoing efforts to reduce noise in hospitals, including the “quiet at night” campaigns, have limited success due to a misunderstanding regarding the characteristics of a restful environment. The auditory environment is the least controllable and the most pervasive, involving communications, technology, family dialogue, sounds of recovery and sounds of disease. This webinar provides both insights and frameworks for creating a healing, restful environment.

This tool provides healthcare designers and professionals with ideas on how to address the issue of noise in facility design.