Considerations in Design of Interior Environment of Outpatient Department in Hospitals

The healthcare environments are complex buildings with a lot of contending space planning and design requirements. Study on hospital spaces has a crucial value, as this is immediately related to human health. Architects and interior designers have a vital role in designing hospital spaces, and healthcare facilities. While designing and planning hospitals' environments besides the scale, volume, shape, size, and light necessary, the architects and interior designers should also consider the particular requirements of the healthcare facilities. This designing or planning procedure can lead to create spaces in which users and patients have pleasant experiences. Recent researches have investigated vastly the concept of healing environment to improve patient’s satisfaction in hospitals. However, a few studies have been done on Outpatient Departments of the hospitals. This study focuses on the quality of interior environment in Outpatient departments of the hospitals and thus contributes to the knowledge on how to design these facilities, with a high spatial quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the space design requirements in design of the aforementioned spaces and to prepare a checklist for the interior designers and architects to be used as a guideline in designing of these departments. This design checklist has been prepared based on researches found through literature review as well as relevant international standards and guidelines for designing healthcare facilities. Furthermore, the study implemented the checklist as a tool for evaluation of the Outpatient Departments in the hospitals. For this purpose, the waiting area space in the outpatient department (policlinic) in Famagusta State Hospital in North Cyprus has been chosen as the case study. After evaluation of the related spaces and defining the problems related to the physical environment, the research proposed some recommendations for improving it. It is strongly believed that this design checklist can be used as an important help and as a guideline for interior designers specially and architects to design hospital outpatient department accordingly. Keywords: Hospital, Healthcare Facility, Outpatient Department OPD, Physical Environment, Quality of Interior Space, Patient.