Last year, June 2020, I defended my PhD thesis in Architecture titled ‘Health-Promotive Building Design – Exploring perspectives on building design for health promotion in healthcare settings’. Here you can find the popular science summary. 

It was already known that the design of hospitals is important for healthcare. Plus, the built environment is important for a society that focuses on health promotion. However, this thesis showed that it is not clear what health promotion means in the field of healthcare building design. The results also showed that it is unclear, for people who work with health promotion in healthcare, how the built environment can contribute to health promotion. This makes it difficult to understand as a designer what you should think of in terms of health promotion. This can even lead to buildings that hinder health promotion approaches in the future.

The dissertation collected different ideas about the design of health-promoting hospitals. More precisely, we have studied health promotion and care architecture as presented in the literature and with people involved in a building design project. The studies shows health promotion, in relation to health promotion in healthcare, can mean many different things. For example health promotion can refer to stimulating healthy behaviours, such as physical activity, social interaction or healthy nutrition. The health-promotive design of the building then could mean attractive and visible stairs, diverse spaces to socialise, or education kitchens to lear to cook a healthy meal. Below you can find a short explainer video of some of my work.