Abstract:
Over the last decades, a growing number of studies with an emphasis on the hospital physical
environment yielded strong evidence that more comfortable, safe, informative, and aesthetically
appealing environments tend to relieve patients’ stress, improve wellbeing, expedite healing processes,
and increase overall satisfaction with medical facilities. Most studies on the impact of environmental
design, however, are hypothesis-driven, and few studies aim to be exploratory about the patients'
priorities and their nature.
The current study intends to bridge the gap and reach two objectives: the first objective is to assess
patient priorities in the key features of the hospital physical environment. The second objective seeks to
compare the patients' priorities in populations of diverse healthcare experience and backgrounds
between Ukraine and the United States. Ukraine is a developing country, undergoing the process of
reforming an outdated healthcare system, and the United States is a country with a well-established
healthcare system with high investment rates in research, innovation, and a focus on medical
technology. The study aims to determine whether design preferences are universal or culturally driven.
As the world rapidly globalizes, the development of medical facilities in different countries heads in the
same direction but with various speed and efficiency. Meanwhile, most of the healthcare studies carried
out today focus on the developed world, offering solutions and guidelines, which deem to be too
expensive and too culturally specific to be applied worldwide. Therefore, the results of the study provide
an attempt to contribute data on culturally specific priorities and set a foundation for further studies
aimed at globally-affordable improvements in hospitals.
