The therapeutic impacts of environmental design interventions on wellness in clinical settings: A narrative review

• Understanding the physical environmental factors is useful to design intervention.
• Physical environmental factors can contribute to reducing stressful conditions.
• The physical environment can enhance privacy, comfort, and overall health care quality.
• Rather than just noise, sound should be viewed as a positive addition to health care.
• Other contributors to a healing environments are possible and should be explored.

PurposeThe aim of this review is to document the role of physical environmental factors in clinical environments and their impact on patients and staff wellness with a particular focus on physical and mental healthcare.MethodsData sources comprised relevant English language articles and the results of literature search of ISI Web of Knowledge, PubMed, Scopus, ProQuest Central, MEDLINE, and Google.ResultsIncorporating physical environmental factors into hospital design can facilitate better user satisfaction, efficiency and organisational outcomes. Many of the design interventions convey positive distractions for patients and staff, in terms of views of pleasant outside vistas, soothing sound, artwork and music.ConclusionsWell-designed physical settings play an important role in the healing process of patients in health care facilities. The challenge then is to fully understand that role in the ecological context of health care. Other contributors are possible and should be explored in further research.