Update on the Humans Working to Create Human Work Environments

Gary and Dave started this blog as a place to put some of their work and conversations on the need for re-humanizing work environments. At the time, both were working in clinical psychiatric practice in New Zealand, although that is no longer the case. Despite meaning well and continuing to periodically chat about ways to move these concepts forward, a number of years have passed since we last posted on this site, November 10, 2012. Now, over three years later, Dave has moved back to the States, but is living in Seattle. Gary has transitioned out of clinical practice and is splitting his time between Wellington, New Zealand and Melbourne, Australia, where he has enrolled in Interior Design Interior Design at CATC / Billy Blue School of Design, Torrens University.

What remains the same is Gary and Dave’s friendship and shared passion for making the world a more “human” place and we would like to re-commit to periodically posting on this blog as we feel it is still a much needed perspective in an environment so often shaped by political, economic, and institutional needs that leaves out basic human needs.

We will each provide a blog entry as an update on what we have each been up to these past few years – then we will get back to work on posting some more of our thoughts and work on Creating Human Work Environments. Here is Gary’s update…

Some ideas about design and the healing environment:

Over the last couple of years, Gary has become increasingly dissatisfied with the constraints of a profession that in his view, maintained a narrow and biased adherence to bio-medical models with a limited capacity to step beyond these. There are some regions of the world that are more amenable to working within an Integrative Medicine Paradigm, but living in a part of the world with a conservative professional approach, he felt that it was time to create a significant change professionally leading to a better work life balance, enhanced creative potential and the realization of a long held passion to pursue a career in design and the decorative arts.

Gary was always inspired by trying to improve the difficult situations that we all as fellow human beings find ourselves in. It was this desire that initially led him into medical practice as opposed to pursing a career in the creative arts. Even though he has tried to create shifts in service design, and look for novel methods of improving service delivery and access, he has often found himself working against a series of bureaucratic processes that prefer to maintain the status quo – a malady of many of the systems that we all find ourselves in.

Gary then set about developing the creative and artistic elements of his skill set by studying Interior Design at CATC / Billy Blue School of Design, Torrens University in Melbourne Australia. Gary sets out to explore the nature of our relationships and dynamics in relation to the spaces that we occupy as human beings - believing that we all need a space to feel welcome, safe and serene. This sense of space and well-being can be sensed in the recently built Melbourne Children’s Hospital, which clearly demonstrates a superb sense of space, light, harmony and transparency in a health care provider setting.

Ref: http://blogs.rch.org.au/news/files/2013/08/Untitled_Panorama1-copy_01.jpg

A photograph of the foyer of the hospital shows a wonderful, bright, cheerful and life enhancing setting with access to clearly defined spaces, a human scale of the elements in the building, bold and fun use of colour, all bringing together a well designed space that is delightful for patients, their parents and caregivers, as well as a pleasant, and uplifting space for staff and health care workers.

The clever use of design in our work and built environments is a fantastic investment in both the clients and staff that use such spaces. Ideas of design and the impact that the designed space has on human behavior and interaction is an area of research for academic psychologists, architects and academic interior designers. Academics working within these collaborative domains have shown many positive benefits to improving the spaces that we all use.

Academic researchers have demonstrated that access to nature and views of nature have improved recovery rates for surgical patients (1) who also used less painkilling medication, when compared to a group of people whose recovery space looked out onto a brick wall.

We would all likely agree that stress exerts significant effects on our health and wellbeing – some would argue that stress is the experience of feeling overwhelmed by external stimuli such as those experienced by adverse environmental, occupational and psychological pressures. Whilst we are not attempting to write a comprehensive review of the academic literature, a quick google search will reveal any number of scientific papers that indicate the positive benefits of environment on our health and well-being.

A paper of interest with respect to environmental effects showed the effects between two groups of healthy students exposed to stressful tasks which was subsequently followed by either listening to classical music or a 20-minute rest period. The group of students that listened to classical music showed positive benefit to the experience when they had a variety of measures of blood pressure take at the end of the experimental period. This allowed the researchers to suggest that classical music may stimulate a part of the nervous system involved in stress reduction and that listening to classical music can be of benefit as a tool for stress reduction (2).

The designed environment should include all aspects of our sensory experience and health care managers need to begin to address these issues, but sadly there are limitations in that so many of these ideas do not have well researched economic advantages in the scientific literature and as such get ignored. As a consequence, we then experience poor design and poorly thought out environments that add to both patient and health-care worker stress.

One of the more bizarre examples of poor design that has been personally experienced by the author, was the display of old surgical instruments located outside the main entrance way to a day surgical unit – just think of the impact that seeing crude old fashioned surgical instruments would have on someone who was walking into the unit for a day-case surgical procedure. This display is likely to be very well intentioned, but somewhat unfortunate in it’s locality – surely a wonderful photograph of the magnificent mountains, beaches and ocean of the locality would have been of much greater humanizing benefit to those entering the space.

Gary’s own experience of the arts and music in a health care setting stretches back to his early days of training as a psychiatrist where he had the great fortunate to work along side The Nightingale Project running through a variety of mental healthcare sites in central London (3). Recollections of being able to walk into the Outpatient Department waiting area as a clinician and witness different and changing art displays was an uplifting experience – indeed one that often served to break the ice when meeting with new people.

It is our view that the creation of a human working environment by both understanding the interaction that we have with each other and also the environment around, whilst complex and multi-dimensional is equally important and if the medical profession and health care economists ignore such ideas, then they do so at great loss to the patients and health care workers.

We hope that we have gathered some interest in our ideas, and that you will join us on our journey of interesting and different viewpoints of a truly integrated and holistic set of ideals linking health, well-being, spirituality and environmental ideas into a healing circle integrating our physical and spiritual domains. On this journey we would like you to join us in thinking about how we relate to the environment around us, our community, and society around and the spirituality that is within us all.

References:

(1)   Ulrich, R.S. 1984. "View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery." Science 224(4647): 420–421.

(2)   Lee Kyoung Soon, Jeong Hyeon Cheol, Yim Jong Eun, and Jeon Mi Yang. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. January 2016, 22(1): 59-65. doi:10.1089/acm.2015.0079.

(3)   http://www.nightingaleproject.org