Therapeutic Landscapes in Hospital Design: A Qualitative Assessment by Staff and Service Users of the Design of a New Mental Health Inpatient Unit

Sarah Curtis, Wil Gesler, Kathy Fabian, Susan Francis and Stefan Priebe
Additional contact information
Sarah Curtis: Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, England
Wil Gesler: Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, England
Kathy Fabian: Independent Newham Users Forum (Mental Health)
Susan Francis: NHS Confederation, England
Stefan Priebe: Centre for Psychiatry, St. Bartholomews and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London, England

Environment and Planning C, 2007, vol. 25, issue 4, 591-610

Abstract: This pilot research project sought to provide a postoccupation assessment of a new mental health inpatient unit in East London, built under the Private Finance Initiative scheme. Qualitative discussion groups or unstructured interviews were used to explore the views of people who had been service users (but were currently well) and of nursing staff and consultants working in the new hospital. The participants gave their views on the aspects of the hospital which were beneficial or detrimental to well-being and the reasons for their views. Informants discussed hospital design in terms of: (1) respect and empowerment for people with mental illness; (2) security and surveillance versus freedom and openness; (3) territoriality, privacy, refuge, and social interactions; (4) homeliness and contact with nature; (5) places for expression and reaffirmation of identity, autonomy, and consumer choice; and (6) integration into sustainable communities. Themes emerging from this research were interpreted in light of ideas from geographical research on therapeutic landscapes constituted as physical, social, and symbolic spaces, as well as research from environmental psychology. The findings have practical implications for hospital design and underline the need to consider empowerment of patients in decisions over hospital design. We note the challenges involved in determining therapeutic hospital design given changing models of care in psychiatry, lack of consensus over models of care, and the varying and somewhat conflicting requirements these imply for the physical, social, and symbolic attributes of design of hospital spaces. We also note the implications of our findings for an interpretation of therapeutic landscapes as contested spaces.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://epc.sagepub.com/content/25/4/591.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:25:y:2007:i:4:p:591-610

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().