Abstract
The second year of Healthcare Healing Environment Design project (HHED) focus on the implementation of the HHED’s Assessment tool on the 17 project member hospitals along with the environmental improvement according to the assessment tool and selecting an area or a building to improve to be a model of HHED and also develop a related research topic according to HHED concept, finally, evaluating users experience from the improvement of the physical environment in order to create academics reference and development of Thai healthcare system. The reflection from the users on the visiting of 17 member hospitals on healthcare healing environment problem, we found problems in 2 dimensions, firstly, for the infrastructure, it is lack of functional using area, secondly is the poor environmental quality that impact work performance and user’s well-being such as heat, poor air quality, bad ventilation which cause staffs’ infection as well as the exceeded standard of carbon dioxide quantity, too many sources of noise that reduce the efficacy of staffs’ productivities, lighting with both not enough light cause the medical errors and the reflection of glare light. From research team’s perspectives, besides those 2 dimensions of problems, we found that there are too many poor-quality media installed on the visual field that increase stress for the user such as direction signposts, room name/ department name those are too diversity and not in a unity format. Sometimes it cause confusion or even straying. While producing various media to communicate to the users, for example, the service instructions, Patients’ terms of service, etc. These badges do not work in practical, the staff still have to answer the same questions which appearing on those badges there is also a large amount of health education media board that is not designed to be interesting. On the contrary, the user refuses to consume the medical education information provided by the hospital because there is too much details that users cannot remember and apply in daily life. From such problems, there is a key issue in selection areas/ department/ buildings as the hospital selected pilot areas for the development of environmental quality that will be caped as healing environment. It is still in the process of collecting evidence of the problem to improve physical environment and the central research team will assist on designing the area according to the context. After the improvements, the research team will collecting data to evaluate user experience according to the improvements that is in the research processes of the third-year of the research project based on user experiences from 5 aspects from the HHED assessment tools which are: 1) Function and safety, 2) Sensing and comfort, 3) Interaction and support, 4) Empowerment and informed choice, and 5) Value and spirituality.
