The built environment is essential for well-being at old age. The theory of salutogenesis, focusing on health, rather than the disease itself, provides evidence that space contributes to health and well-being. This has influenced healthcare architecture through facilities designed to support well-being. So, increasingly healthcare facilities aim to look like hotels to improve user experience. This retains conceptual and usage gaps between hospitality and healthcare but supports cross-fertilization of best practice. This paper explores possibilities of synergies between healthcare facilities and hospitality industry. Appropriate services and well-being across the lifespan is the ultimate objective, and the physical environment is critical in that provision. Examining the architectural typology of the dementia village as case study, it explores healthcare–hospitality hybrids. Learning from both domains can contribute to silver economy while providing the aging population with enhanced environment. Aging population and stakeholders in this ecosystem can benefit from these synergies.

/pdf/architectural-hybrids-for-living-across-the-lifespan-lessons-25f4rlfbyx.pdf

Architectural hybrids for living across the lifespan: lessons from dementia

How architectural design affords experiences of freedom in residential care for older people.

Revista Nacional de Gerenciamento de Cidades

Research has demonstrated that enabling societal and physical infrastructure and personal accommodations enhance healthy and active aging throughout the lifespan. Yet, there is a paucity of research on how to bring together the various disciplines involved in a multidomain synergistic collaboration to create new living environments for aging. This paper aims to explore the key domains of skills and knowledge that need to be considered for a conceptual prototype of an enabling educational process and environments where healthcare professionals, architects, planners, and entrepreneurs may establish a shared theoretical and experiential knowledge base, vocabulary, and implementation strategies, for the creation of the next generation of living communities of active healthy adults, for persons with disabilities and chronic disease conditions. We focus on synergistic, paradigmatic, simple, and practical issues that can be easily upscaled through market mechanisms. This practical and physically concrete approach may also become linked with more elaborate neuroscientific and technologically sophisticated interventions. We examine the domains of knowledge to be included in establishing a learning model that focuses on the still-understudied impact of the benefits toward active and healthy aging, where architects, urban planners, clinicians, and healthcare facility managers are educated toward a synergistic approach at the operational level.

/pdf/perspectives-on-the-role-and-synergies-of-architecture-and-1l1fpkzjr4.pdf

Perspectives on the Role and Synergies of Architecture and Social and Built Environment in Enabling Active Healthy Aging.

Aim:We aim to gain insight into how a dementia special care unit is used and experienced by its residents and what design aspects are important therein.Background:In Flanders, housing for people wi...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1937586718796614

How Enclosure and Spatial Organization Affect Residents' Use and Experience of a Dementia Special Care Unit: A Case Study.

Housing for older people in Flanders evolves toward small-scale facilities and better quality of life Ageing population strains the means to achieve this to the limit The authors investigate whether and how Flemish large-scale facilities can adapt to meet contemporary and future requirements of housing for older people By analyzing current tendencies, they depict what this housing should look like, both now and in the future They then investigate how an existing large-scale care home could fit this picture by using design as a mode of knowledge production They propose to redesign the site such that its actual evolution would be thoroughly redirected Beyond the facility at issue, the study shows how Flemish large-scale facilities could develop to keep playing a role in the future They should timely adapt their size with qualities of small-scale housing schemes, and integrate in the neighborhood

In Search of a Future for Large-Scale Care Homes in Flanders

Objective This study explored how built space plays out in palliative care, focusing on spatial aspects that could support or hamper patients’, relatives’ and caregivers’ well-being. Methods This study was conducted in a freestanding small-scale hospice combining a residential part for eight guests with a day-care part for groups of about five persons. Observations were combined with semistructured, individual interviews with eight guests (sometimes accompanied by relatives) and three focus-group interviews with staff, volunteers and relatives. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed based on the Qualitative Analysis Guide of Leuven. Results The most important spatial aspects that impact on physical and social well-being in palliative care turned out to be the building scale and physical proximity. The small-scale setting counters the (often negative) association of palliative care with hospital environments. When the medical condition of the guest allows, it makes communal or outdoor spaces reachable, which enhances emotional and social well-being. In worse conditions, it still makes that care and nature are always nearby. The compactness of communal spaces intensifies social contacts. Conclusions The building scale and physical proximity play out in the relationship between the building and its surroundings, between the residential and the day-care parts and among people within the building. Future research could investigate to what extent these spatial aspects are relevant in more conventional palliative care units or even in general hospital wards.

https://spcare.bmj.com/content/bmjspcare/early/2020/05/14/bmjspcare-2019-002151.full.pdf

Building scale and well-being in a hospice: a qualitative exploration

Housing for older people in Flanders evolves toward small-scale, homelike environments. As population ageing puts pressure on the affordability of this tendency, architects are challenged to design innovative living schemes that offer the advantages of smale-scaleness in an affordable way. Little is known, however, about how people use and experience these schemes. Therefore we analyse how a recently built innovative housing and care facility is experienced by its residents. Analysis of interviews and guided tours suggests that the contemporary architecture is not criticised, but that its materialisation should offer a more homelike atmosphere. The generic layout is experienced as highly confusing and should offer more differentiation. The study confirms the importance of furnishing a place in making it “your own”, and shows how architects can facilitate this. While the design incorporates qualities of small-scale, homelike living schemes for people with dementia, the facility lacks some of the underlying ideals. It is therefore unclear whether the intended benefits for people with dementia are still present in this specific set-up. Together the findings illustrate the importance of follow-up studies since architects might take such an innovative concept as an example without knowing its actual benefits and deficiencies. They also highlight the added value of qualitative case studies for such unique housing and care projects.

How Do Older Residents Experience a Recently Built Innovative Housing and Care Facility

People’s health and well-being is known to be affected by the built environment. Since prisons are confronted with an overrepresentation of people with mental and physical health issues, we examine how the built prison environment affects the provision of care for prisoners with specific needs. Based on observations and (focus group) interviews with prisoners, prison officers, and care-staff, we report on the experiences of specific groups in highly particular prison environments: various pavilions of a former penal colony. By analyzing spatialities in relation to practices and temporalities of care, we provide a nuanced understanding of what caring entails in a prison environment. We show that in this context caring for safety, normality, and physical health ideally go hand in hand. To conclude, we illustrate that the need for control within a prison environment can be reduced by spatial variety, offering different types of settings matching different care and living needs, and allowing movement between settings depending on these needs.

Practices of Care in a Multipavilion Prison: An Exploratory Study on the Role of the Built Environment

The term ‘hospice’ refers to both a philosophy of end-of-life care and a building type, dedicated to offering this care. Hospice care strives to offer dignity, personal choice, peace, calm, and freedom from pain. Hospice care is anchored in space and spatial practices; however this relation is understudied. It is a rather new building type, for which architects have few historical references, post-occupancy evaluations, or direct experiences available. The prospect of replacing a Belgian hospice offered an opportunity for a case study. We aim to understand how the built environment of a hospice affects experiences of care, and discuss design considerations derived from that. Our qualitative research approach was based on principles of Grounded Theory and combined observations with semi-structured interviews with six staff members, six volunteers, three relatives and eight patients. Our analysis shows that the built environment contributes to hospice care by the balance it affords between privacy and social interaction, by the discrete ways in which it affords offering high-level care, and by its human scale and relation to the natural environment. Insights gained challenge hospice designers to consider how meaningful encounters are often spontaneously triggered by daily activities; guests’ lifeworld changes in size; a delicate balance is required between proximity and seclusion; the built environment can support the ethos of staff and volunteers; aspects of environmental support (e.g. accessibility) are intertwined with aspects of emotional comfort (e.g. hominess); high-level care can be offered in discrete ways. 

The role of the built environment in experiences of hospice care: challenges for hospice design

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Koen Coomans

Author Tools

Chat about Author