Evidence Based Design in Healthcare Facilities

Abstract

The design of healthcare structures is a complex and constantly evolving issue due to the need for addressing various interrelated functions. Today, user involvement in the design phase is considered to be one of the main pillars of successful design. However, in healthcare structures, efforts toward this end are often hampered by the need for identifying the various requirements of multiple user groups and for setting priorities between different requirements of these groups. Recently, the effects of physical environmental conditions on user satisfaction have become more important in health building designs. Along with the rise of user satisfaction in design, the concept called 'evidence-based design' is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers and has become the theoretical concept of the healing physical environment in design. The aim of this study is to determine the gaps and areas needed to improve the effects of the physical environment on the user in terms of evidence-based design strategies. In this context, scientific studies on the design of health buildings between 2012 and 2021 were systematically reviewed and analyzed according to the evidence-based pyramid method with kohen kappa analysis within the scope of evidence-based design criteria. A total of 1641 articles were identified for the scope of the study. Among these a total of 48 scientific studies were analyzed fitted to the criteria of the study. The impacts of physical environment on users are evaluated on two main types of user groups: (1) patients and relatives and (2) healthcare workers. The results reveal that evidence design principles are mostly evaluate in terms of patients and there are gaps in evidence-based design literature for healthcare personnel and more studies should be undertaken by multidisciplinary teams for the development of design strategies.