Insights
Sep 26, 2023 _ insights
Finding Your Way In and Around Hospitals: Patient Arrival and Spatial Navigation at Large Hospitals
You don’t have to be a designer to know that hospitals can be very difficult to navigate. Combining dozens of functional units, multiple buildings, and numerous circulation paths, hospitals abound in opportunities to get lost. This is especially true in large, urban hospitals, where ongoing growth squeezes into tightly bounded footprints.
While navigation and wayfinding strategies within hospitals have been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to this process at the campus level. So, along with GBBN’s Kirsten Miller, Kansas University’s Hui Cai, and University of Mysore, India’s Monalipa Dash, I set out to fill in this research gap.
We recently presented some of our findings at EDRA54, the Environmental Design Research Association’s annual conference in Mexico City. Here are some of the key takeaways:
- Campus Configuration: Our space syntax analysis describes three types of hospital campuses according to their organizational scheme—Building-Focused (organized around a single, important building), Axis-Focused (organizes most important buildings along a single axis), and Dispersed (no clear organization).
- The Building-Focused Medical Campus received the highest intelligibility scores, indicating that it has the most likelihood of fostering efficient wayfinding. That’s not to say that this is the only or best organization. There are too many factors to allow for easy generalization, but it is promising from a navigational and wayfinding point of view. The example of this type of campus that we studied was the University of Cincinnati Medical Center (UCMC), whose main entrance was recently renovated by GBBN.
- Onsite observation and behavior mapping confirmed a high efficiency in wayfinding on the campus of UCMC. For example, we found that it only takes about two minutes on average for vehicles to move through the arrival zone. We also documented that the information desks in the lobby are successfully serving as wayfinding hubs to guide the flow visitors through the space.
To learn more, view our presentation here. Learn about UCMC’s Main Entrance improvements here.
Shan Jiang, PH.D., International ASLA is GBBN’s Director of Research. An established researcher, educator, and thought leader, she has published dozens of articles in peer-reviewed journals, presented at conferences, and recently published a full monograph with Routledge on therapeutic landscapes, healthcare design, and sustainable community development. At GBBN, Shan leads firm-wide research efforts, helping design teams in all markets conduct research while drawing on the best, established research to inform their work.
