Wailea, Maui - I’m attending an Estes Park Institute conference listening to a short presentation by Leland Kaiser, a Senior Fellow at the Institute, talk about “evidenced-based environmental design” a new, emerging perspective when it comes to hospitals and their healing potential. Besides hospital design being functional and aesthetic, he argues that hospitals have to become “transformative and healing”; the hospital, in and of itself, should be evocative of the individual’s health potential.

Kaiser believes hospitals should move from being a “service industry” to an “experiential” industry. They should be much more than “containers” of the sick, he says. Hospitals are active health agents, whose responsibilities begin before the patient is admitted and extend to after patients are discharged. A re-visioning is in order, and a big part of that process is designing hospitals to fit with patients, their families and, their employees. Whole courses of disease, he believes, can be altered by changing environments. More research and advocacy like that being at the Center for Health Desig is need says Kaiser.