THE ESSENTIAL
- This study involved 3,964 patients who underwent 13 high-risk surgeries (including colectomy, pancreatectomy, and kidney transplant) at the University of Michigan Hospital between 2016 and 2019.
- The patients had been admitted to rooms located on two floors of the hospital.
- These patient rooms were coded according to various characteristics: window or no window, single occupancy or double occupancy, and distance from the nursing station.
Sometimes small things can make a big difference in health. Researchers at the University of Michigan in the US report that certain hospital room layouts – such as having a window view, staying in a single room or being closer to a nursing station – can influence outcomes following high-risk surgeries.
This is not the first time that this subject has been studied. A number of previous researches have already suggested that hospital architecture and interior design can improve patient care and outcomes. A study published in 1984 revealed that providing patients with a view of the window can lead to better recovery following surgery. Still other studies have shown that critically ill patients assigned to intensive care wards who do not feel adequately cared for by medical staff may be more likely to have poorer health outcomes.
A window in a hospital room can reduce the risk of death by 20%
The University of Michigan team sought to better understand whether various characteristics of hospital rooms can actually impact mortality and length of stay following surgery. Their results have not yet been published but they were presented at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2022 Scientific Forum (ACS).
According to the researchers, mortality rates among high-risk surgeries varied well by room design features. Thus, mortality rates were 20% higher if patients were admitted to a hospital room without a window compared to if they were placed in a room with a window. This remained true even following the researchers took into account patient comorbidities and the complexity of the operation. Among patients staying in a windowless room, 30-day mortality rates were also 10% higher.
“This investigation provided evidence that patients had different outcomes across room design features, when considering clinical risk, and warrants further investigation into how hospital design may influence the results”says study co-author Mitchell J. Mead, a health and design specialist at the University of Michigan, in a communiqué.
Improving hospital design to better care for patients
According to the authors, this study is just one illustration of the neglect of the link between hospital design and patient outcomes. Investing in research to better design hospital rooms might potentially help a lot of patients.
In the future, the researchers would like to see new studies on the same subject in order to analyze the results in several other hospitals. They are currently in the process of replicating a similar study in another Michigan hospital and hope to recruit collaborators in other hospital systems. They also plan to expand the scope of the study to include other endpoints such as pain medication use and patient satisfaction in each room type.
