Healing Environment in the Intensive Care Units: enhancing daylight and access to view, cases from Palestine

Abstract

Daylight and access to outside views are key factors to improve the healing environment for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), which decreases the incidence of delirium. This is essential as well to provide appropriate working conditions for healthcare providers. Besides the geographic location, daylight in any space is mainly affected by five parameters: window orientation, window level, window to wall ratio, light reflectance value of the inner surfaces of the walls and the used shading device. This study aims to assess the conditions of the ICUs in the Palestinian hospitals in terms of providing daylight and access to view, by analyzing the ICUs’ plans and making field visits to take observations and daylight measurements. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with the medical staff to describe their satisfaction, observation and patients’ complaints. The study also extends to optimize the parameters affecting daylight to achieve the optimal daylighting while minimizing the heating and cooling loads without restricting patients’ access to view, through conducting a multi-objective optimization using DesignBuilder simulation tool, and to use the results to modify the current designs of the studied ICUs. The study found that the ICU designs in Palestine do not deliver adequate daylight and access to view for patients. The results of the optimization phase show differences in the optimum values of the window to wall ratio, window level and the shading devices specifications according to the type of the patient area and the orientation scenario. While it was found that the south is the optimum orientation and 0.9 is the optimum light reflectance value of the indoor surfaces. Furthermore, the study found that there is a high potential for enhancement of the current ICUs that have shallowplan layouts using the optimization results.