Close your eyes and picture a hospital. What did you see?
Most likely, your mind jumped to sterile rooms and fresh white paint. If asked to imagine the smell, you might have conjured a mixture of Lysol wipes and rubber gloves.
While these descriptors are important pieces of maintaining a cleanly environment, hospitals around Pennsylvania are working to create an atmosphere of holistic healing by harnessing two of the most peaceful, restorative tools available: nature and art.
Just take a look at Magee-Womens Hospital in Oakland. The hospital worked with Dreamakur, an interior design company, to transform six hospital rooms into vivid outdoor scenes, including butterflies, trees, grass, and blue skies. The goal of these rooms was to put a smile on patient’s faces, helping kids (and their parents) to relax and find joy during a stressful time.
UPMC Children’s Hospital is another example of hospitals utilizing healing elements into their structural design. Recently, the CHP partnered with CannonDesign to create a state-of-the-art healing garden, as well as a transformation corridor and colorful, kid-friendly building elements.
Main Line Health Hospital and Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital has an Art Ability Program that recently had a positive turnout.
Beth Gotfried
Dan Neufeld
Robert Flatt
Sriharsha Sukla
Linda and Sal Panasci
Doylestown Hospital’s Health and Wellness Center provides a beautiful flowering garden, which includes interpretative monuments. These pieces of artwork highlight the hospital’s history of healing, as well as soothing healing symbols and images and comforting health-centered quotations.
Bryn Mawr’s healing garden — or horticultural therapy center — focuses on using plants, gardens and natural elements to improve people’s well being and aid their recovery. The Enabling Garden is fully wheelchair accessible and even features raised beds to accommodate patients unable to walk. The center features high cathedral ceilings, skylights, and a greenhouse filled with a range of flowering plants that patients are invited to help design, plant, and maintain.
MossRehab Einstein Healthcare Network offers a similar opportunity for patients to cultivate their green thumb in the conservatory. Highlights include a living wall, stones from a local creek, and a calming water feature.
Allentown’s Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Center has taken healing spaces in a different direction, offering art classes and featuring artwork created by patients around the hospitals.
These healing design elements showcase Pennsylvania’s hospitals desires to put the patient first and meet their needs, emotionally, as well as physically.