There is evidence that daylight exposure can affect post-operative outcomes in patients and, consequently, that daylight should be a consideration in hospital design. Ulrich (1984) reported that hospital patients with a view of green spaces, as opposed to those with a view of a blank brick wall, recovered more quickly from surgery and required less post-operative pain medication. Beauchemin and Hays (1998) found that patients on the sunnier side of a cardiac intensive care ward showed lower mortality rates than those on the less-sunny side. Another study deter- mined that sunlight exposure was associated with both improved subjective assessment of the patients and also reduced levels of analgesic medication routinely administered to control post-operative pain (Walch et al., 2005). The importance of the amount of daylight in a patient’s room indicates an impact on patients’ length of stay; coronary artery bypass graft surgery patients’ length of stay in hospital was reduced by 7.3 hours per 100 lx increase of daylight (Joarder and Price, 2013).
IMPACT OF DAYLIGHT ON HOSPITAL RECOVERY
