Design Criteria for Privacy-Sensitive Healthcare Buildings

Abstract—Architects are faced with many policies and guidance documents when designing hospitals. These differ in focus, structure and clarity. An Architect task of eliciting, understanding and responding to design criteria becomes even more confusing when it comes to intangible criteria such as patient’s privacy. The aims of this paper is to identify and review main sources of information on hospital design that are available for architects in the UK in order to summarize these criteria and distill criteria related to privacy. The focus is on visual privacy as a function of the spatial arrangements of hospital wards which is, in turn, under the control of architects. The study employs a two-fold methodological approach: semi-structured interview with experts in hospital design; and content analysis and comparative investigation of policies and guidance documents. This exhaustive study revealed that the concern about privacy is clearly expressed in the surveyed documents. The privacy-related criteria are framed within the larger context of hospital and ward design criteria. This contributes to the existing scattered literature on hospital design criteria with a new summary of design criteria at three levels: ward spatial arrangements, patient’s privacy, patient’s visual privacy. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research on privacy-sensitive healthcare building design.