Salutogenic design : redesigning hospital waiting space to promote health and wellbeing

Abstract

With the need of pursuing better health condition for the human body in every way, hospital design solutions have been examined and revised over and over from the past to the present. Emphasizing the significance of paying attention to health rather than to disease, Salutogenic design has been introduced in the last 40 years as a perspective of environmental impact on people in hospital settings from a psychosocial point of view. Terrible hospital experience have been happening everywhere not only because of insufficient material and staff but also because of the way of organizing nontreatment spaces like entrances, waiting lounges, corridors, gift shops, and so on.

Auckland City Hospital, as a typical complex general hospital located at Grafton, is chosen as the site of this project due to the lack of salutogenic concern in its design.

This project proposes that waiting spaces, as important parts of non-treatment space, can help improve health by the application of salutogenic design. The concept of " the sense of coherence" is explored by its three key components: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. Design elements with the salutogenic effect are proposed and tested in various ways, and then they will be applied to Auckland City Hospital. This will not only create a healthy hospital environment, but also animate the Grafton community with an atmosphere of healing and wellness.

Although hospital waiting space is the focus of this project, it will also address more non-treatment types of space (circulation spaces, activity spaces, coffee spaces, and so on) rather than just the traditional definition of a waiting room.