Study of hospital ward configurations with respect to patients therapeutic need of daylighting in context of Dhaka

Abstract

Lack of adequate daylight for biological stimulation can lead to health problems, such as depression and imbalanced circadian rhythm. It is important to ensure adequate daylighting for physiologically and/or psychologically stressed hospital patients, as majority of them stay indoor for 24 hours for several days and often affected by a lack of daylight needed in 24 hour diurnal cycle. Daylight can be a strong therapeutic environmental design element to ensure good health, and accelerate clinical recovery of hospital patients. However, in practice, how much daylight is enjoyed by the patients’ are rarely considered.

In the hospital planning and ward layouts, many configurations are available (for example circular, semi-circular, linear, triangular) around the world and some designs seem sensitive with respect to daylighting and outdoor views. Sometimes, the large windows are unable to ensure appropriate type of daylight, due to the shape of the room and/or placement of beds. On the other hand, by selecting the effective shape of the ward and bed layout, plenty of daylight could be ensured even the openings are not bigger. An investigation and comparison of the existing hospitals with respect to the hospital layout found in history might help to develop some guidelines and design strategies to select ward configurations to ensure therapeutic daylight for hospital patients around the year in the context of Dhaka.

This research tries to find an effective passive ward configuration for hospital design through computer simulation analysis. Daylight simulation was performed by creating the virtual environment based on the information of an existing hospital building located in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a tropical location, with predominantly overcast skies. Both static and dynamic annual Climate-Based Daylight Modeling (CBDM), methods considering all weather sky luminance model (i.e. DAYSIM), have been used for simulation analysis. Further simulation analysis was done to refine the design parameters (e.g. gap-in-between wings, width and length of the wings) of the most effective ward configuration.

Results indicate that, pavilion shaped north-south elongated wings that have a parallel link with corridor configuration performed the best among the studied configurations. Thus, there is a considerable potential for more useful daylight inclusion into hospital ward area by careful selection of ward configuration and some simple sensible modification in present ward configuration system of multistoried Hospital buildings. Field observations, literature review and simulation studies together provide the basis of design guidelines for architects to design sustainable daylit hospitals. It is expected that the design strategies and recommendations from this research for ward configuration will improve the luminous environment of hospital wards of Dhaka by effective inclusion of daylight to increase therapeutic quality of the ward area and fast recovery of the patients.