Indoor environment has a potential impact on health by influencing behaviors, actions, and interactions of patients and their families as well as the health providers. The motto of health professionals since Hippocrates “First, do no harm” seems to be not widely followed in recent times. Unhealthy buildings can cause a lot of illnesses to occupants. Sick building syndrome (SBS) is a poorly understood phenomenon where people have a range of symptoms related to a certain building and there is no specific identifiable cause. The effect of poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is not only on physical health of the building occupants, but also on their psychological health. Through extensive review, the paper addresses different factors, which affect both physical and psychological health of occupants in healing environments.
These factors are divided into two main categories; (a) spatial factors, which include the architecture design of the space, views of nature and nature images, indoor plants and landscaping, wayfinding and orientation of the space, pleasant color scheme, the presence of coordinated art objects, furniture layout, and video and virtual reality environments; and (b) environmental factors include air quality and freshness, availability of daylight, thermal comfort, and acoustic quality.
Since hospitals are profoundly different from other types of buildings, the study focused on integrating the aforementioned factors toward an optimal healing environment for children in a state pediatric hospital in Assiut city, which has potential impacts on occupant satisfaction and wellbeing. Based on a comprehensive literature review, the paper also summarizes both negative and positive factors, which provide a point of departure for further investigation and exploration within the field of IEQ in healing environments.