The effects of the thermal environment on occupants’ responses in health care facilities: A literature review

Understanding the environmental characteristics that affect health and well-being is a requirement for good indoor environment design. The thermal environment is one of the factors that may affect patients, staff, family, and visitors in health care facilities (HCFs), and perceptions of general thermal comfort and local thermal discomfort are affected by air temperature, radiant temperature, relative humidity, air velocity, turbulence intensity, activity, and clothing. This study reviewed the effects of the thermal environment on patient and staff responses in HCFs, especially in patient and operating rooms. The material in this literature review consists of peer-reviewed journal articles searched by using PubMed and Google and by searching the reference lists of relevant articles (based on their titles and abstracts). According to the literature, thermal environment is one of the fundamental characteristics of the indoor environment and the effects of temperature on the comfort, well-being, safety, and health of both the patients and the health care personnel are broadly recognized. Thermal comfort affects sleep quality and quantity in a patient room, and thermal comfort or discomfort during surgery has an effect on the patient’s overall satisfaction with surgical care. It also affects the comfort and performance of the health care personnel who work in these environments. In the future, finding adequate solutions to reconcile the different thermal comfort conditions required by different occupants in hospitals will be important. Both the needs of patients and the attending hospital workers in different hospital spaces should be taken into account. Possible solutions could be, for example, different thermal micro environments based on different temperature and air velocity for different thermal comfort requirements, appropriate clothing for patients and staff, or active warming devices above patients.