Designing micro-restorative environments for Healthcare Professionals

Increasingly, healthcare professionals’ time and resources available for individual patients are stretched, placing undue physical and psychological pressure on staff, not to mention potential detrimental impacts on the patient. Cognitive and emotional restoration is essential to continue providing care at an appropriate level, without healthcare professionals suffering from compassion fatigue, attentional fatigue, and ultimately burnout. Restoration may be sought in staff-rooms, canteens, hospital gardens, or for some the smoking shelter, all of these opportunities however may be for limited amounts of time. Thus the concept of micro-restoration is important, whereby individuals have the chance to restore a little and often, providing brief moments of psychological restoration.

This PhD will examine the design of internal and nearby external environments for healthcare professionals such as GPs, doctors, social care workers. It will explore their perceptions on seeking and finding restorative opportunities at work, establishing their coping mechanisms, and essentially where they go, or want to go, to restore. The research will predominantly involve qualitative methodologies to seek a fuller understanding of the issues, although some quantitative aspects may also be suitable. For example, depending on the candidate, experiments exploring the audio-visual impact of different designs within a healthcare context in enabling micro-restoration may be of interest. The outcomes will extend psychological restoration research and contribute to the design of ‘healthy buildings’ for those who help keep us healthy. The successful candidate will be in the research theme group Health and Wellbeing in the Built Environment, in the Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Building Design.