Humanizing Where We Heal: An Examination of Healthcare Aesthetics and Evidence-Based Hospital Design

Abstract

This thesis explores how the aesthetics and overall design of a patient’s healing environment affects his/her healthcare experience. The industrialization of the modern hospital and the business of medicine has polluted what it means to provide holistic, patient-centered care. The emergence of evidence-based design provides a chance to re-center medicine by adopting a humanistic understanding of medicine that thoroughly examines patients’ needs and the specific design factors that are supportive to these needs. Through a meta-analysis, the themes consistent among the current literature are synthesized to clarify the role healthcare aesthetics and hospital design have on patient experience. While patient experience is often a complex, ambiguous factor in medicine, evidence-based design ultimately fosters a healthcare environment that integrates the patient into the fabric of the healing space.