In behavioral health, the built environment is a crucial component of effective treatment and therapeutic outcomes. While safety has long been the primary design concern in these settings, the need to create therapeutic spaces that support well-being and recovery is now recognized globally, evidenced recently in “The Role of the Built Environment as a Therapeutic Intervention in Mental Health Facilities: A Systematic Literature Review” (Rodríguez-Labajos et al., 2024).
The built environment influences both people’s perception of a behavioral health facility and the emotional response they feel as they enter and live within it. As such, its design has the ability to either benefit or hinder recovery journeys. For example, people who perceive inpatient mental health care negatively are more likely to require a further admission under a legal sanction, as well as require longer admissions (Csipke et al., 2014; Van Der Post et al., 2014, and Williams et al., 2014, cited in “Improving patient experiences of mental health inpatient care: a randomised controlled trial”, T. Wykes et al., 2017).
Such research has led to great innovation in design for behavioral and mental health environments, fueled by a need to create spaces that improve patients’ perceptions, and to develop safe yet normalized solutions that support therapeutic outcomes in challenging environments.
Enhancing challenging environments through patient-centered design
At Kingsway Group, driving innovation in design has been core to our mission since forming in 2009, leading to us successfully supporting over 10,000 projects around the world, providing humanized solutions that de-risk and enhance challenging environments for the people living within them.
Be it through our Complete Door Systems or our latest patient safety & well-being technology offerings, our solutions are designed through a human & patient-centered approach in order to best support the people who will encounter them during their most vulnerable times. By prioritizing the needs, preferences, and experiences of patients when designing, this approach ensures our solutions can contribute towards helping patients feel valued and respected throughout their recovery journey.
A recent focus within design for behavioral health involves creating spaces that provide patients with a greater sense of control over their environment. These design choices can help patients to feel more at ease, which in turn has the potential to enhance their overall well-being and improve their perception of the care setting.
This ethos was central when designing SERENITY, our new patient-wellness interactive panel. In behavioral health care settings, patients can often lose a sense of control over their environment as some of their everyday freedoms may be removed in order to ensure safety. This loss of control can negatively impact their overall well-being, and subsequently hinder their recovery journeys.
SERENITY aims to re-instill this sense of control, allowing patients to safely personalize their own space through a range of therapeutic and intuitive applications, each designed through feedback from behavioral health care professionals to promote relaxation, aid de-escalation, and encourage proactive communication with care staff.
SERENITY also benefits from an integrated lighting system that patients can intuitively control, perhaps setting it to their favorite color or by activating the circadian rhythm mode to help promote better sleep.
Patients can relax to therapeutic scenes and sounds designed specifically for use within care settings, known as roomscapes. The roomscapes feature natural landscapes and relaxing imagery, and are synced with changeable colored lighting, together helping to promote a sense of calmness. Staff can remotely override these features when required, and can also remotely activate gentle observation lighting in order to carry out nighttime observations without waking the patient.
Supporting, not replacing communication
Another feature developed through feedback from behavioral and mental health care professionals is SERENITY’s ‘Check In’ function, allowing patients to select how they are feeling (at their own discretion) from a range of emotions. This is then fed back to care teams in order to support proactive communication between the patient and clinical staff to strengthen patient-staff relationships and help diffuse heightened states of emotion where necessary.
Research shows that relationships with care staff form a core part of inpatients’ experiences within behavioral and mental health care settings, and that barriers to positive relationships can include “ineffective and negative communication” and “a lack of trust” between staff and patients (Gilburt, H., Rose, D. & Slade, M. The importance of relationships in mental health care: A qualitative study of service users’ experiences of psychiatric hospital admission in the UK. 2008). Methods of encouraging proactive communication between care staff and patients can help to strengthen relationships, and in turn have a positive effect on a patient’s experience within the care setting (find out more about SERENITY).
The conversation continues on Tuesday, March 11!
Join us on Tuesday, March 11 for an online Lunch & Learn event featuring special guest speaker, Dimitri Wilson, where we’ll explore the value of human-centered design in supporting well-being and therapeutic outcomes in behavioral health.
