Landscaping for hospitals doesn’t just need to look good. It can also help patients heal.
This is what makes gardens amazing additions to hospitals and healthcare facilities in Northeast Ohio. They can offer so many advantages to their patients, staff, and visitors.
Many studies show that spending just 3 to 5 minutes looking at plants, flowers, trees, or water can reduce anger, uneasiness, pain, and stress, as well as boost calmness and relaxation. In fact, patients with views of nature from their windows typically have shorter hospital stays and require less pain medication than patients who only look at building or concrete views.
But property managers at hospitals have more on their plates than just landscape design and improvement. We understand; you are busy, so focusing on the right hospital landscape design can be challenging.
Let’s look at some key improvements that can benefit your healthcare facility – from creating relaxing, restful landscaping to maintaining green areas for the best year-long aesthetics.
How to Use Improvements to Upgrade Landscaping For Hospitals
Since a hospital is a scary environment, you want your patients and their family members to feel like they’ve entered a safe, welcoming place for healing and recuperation.
Nature and outdoor elements are really powerful healing forces, making them great additions to any hospital environment. People of every age and background can react positively to greenery, and this can have an overall great effect on someone’s health – no matter what their physical ailment is.
In fact, more than two-thirds of people say they choose a natural setting to retreat to when they are stressed out, according to researchers from Marcus and Barnes. And 95% of people who spend time outside report improved moods afterward, going from stressed to calm.
Well-maintained landscaping for hospitals can turn healthcare facilities from noisy, disorienting mazes that increase anxiety into places that help promote wellness and healing.
Landscaping for hospitals can captivate patient and family attention. When a person can see nature or experience garden elements, they can feel a reduction in discomfort and even see some results instantly, such as a lowering of blood pressure. In fact, people who spent more time among trees had lower blood pressure, lower cortisol levels, and a lower pulse than people who spent more time indoors or in city areas, Florida Health reports
To get a space that embodies healing, try some of these must-include items for hospital landscape design.
1. Add Greenery
Greenery is essential in landscaping for hospitals, particularly when your healthcare facility is located in a city where concrete is the main aesthetic. You want to provide your patients, visitors, and hospital staff with a green escape away from hard city edges.
Do this by bringing nature alive in your environment with trees,shrubs, flowers, ornamental grasses, and water features into your healthcare landscape. You want a nice balance: approximately 70% plants and 30% concrete or hardscape elements like walkways.
2. Deliver Comfort
Landscape design for hospitals must provide people with options to maximize their comfort since a healthcare facility can be a naturally uncomfortable environment.
This means creating multiple options based on employees’ and patients’ specific needs. For instance, while shade is important, having some access to sunlight can deliver balance. Screening can help shield winds.
And don’t forget to provide places for people to rest outdoors. To maximize the best comfort, choose garden seats with backs and arms to assist patients who may need help rising from seated positions.
Finally, make sure smoking areas are placed away from healing gardens so as not to bother patients. This also ensures nature’s soothing scents prevail.
3. Tap Into the Senses
Hospital landscape design should also tap into multiple senses to bring a full relaxing and healing experience for employees and patients.
Tree and shrub screens can soften traffic or city noises. Don’t place a tranquil, healing garden for employees, patients, and visitors near loud air-conditioning units, helicopter pads, or delivery areas. Also, you can add additional calming sounds by placing water features in these spaces. Ornamental grasses that blow in the breeze can even add some positive movement and soft sounds.
Next, bring in visual and audible elements by adding native plants that can draw in butterflies and birds. Flowers also bring bright colors and amazing fragrances throughout the year.
When choosing hardscapes, keep angles soft and round versus hard and angular. You don’t want patients getting lost in dead-end paths or complex mazes; instead think about curved walking paths with cozy areas for rest and reflection.
4. Don’t Neglect Accessibility
If possible, hospital landscape design areas should be visible from the main nurses’ station and have easy access for all visitors, patients, and employees. This ensures proper attention can be paid to all who need it.
To do this, consider wider paths to ensure entry into the outdoor space and pathways is easily navigable by wheelchairs, crutches, and other common healing tools. Use clearly marked signs to guide people to and from the outdoor space from lobbies, corridors, and patient rooms.
5. Remember Safety Is Important
Regular landscape maintenance ensures safety as a priority.
This means keeping roadways and signage clear with yearly pruning, ensuring hardscapes don’t have trip and fall hazards, as well as keeping snow and ice cleared from roadways and drainage pathways.
Ensuring you have professional commercial landscape design services in Northeast Ohio and commercial landscape maintenance services in Northwest Ohio can help you keep your hospital landscape safe and secure for all visitors.
Your Northeast Ohio Healthcare Facility Can Have Healing Hospital Landscape Design
Healing is the most important service you provide as a healthcare facility. Anything you can do to increase the healing process can improve your hospital in Northeast Ohio.
Hospital landscape design can contribute to this healing process. As you read through our recommendations, you might find that your commercial property presents some challenges to becoming more of a healing space. We know it can be overwhelming, and that’s why Turfscape is here. We have extensive experience designing and installing commercial landscapes at hospitals and would love to help provide solutions for your space.
Turfscape would be happy to discuss some of these healthcare landscaping ideas with you. Request a proposal today for your Northeast Ohio property. We’ll review your options and budget together so you can make the best choice.
