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Greenery around hospitals ease confusion, anger: Study

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Shagun
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Greenery around hospitals ease confusion, anger: Study
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West Virginia , February 21: Walking and moving around large hospitals can often feel like being stuck in a trap. For patients and visitors, finding the way around a visually-bland medical complex adds to an already stressful mental state. However, a recent study shows the incredible impacts of adding greenery in such complexes.
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According to a landscape architecture researcher at West Virginia University, 'letting nature in' is a possible solution. Research conducted by Shan Jiang shows that introducing nature into large hospitals complexes can humanize the institutional environment, reducing stress among patients, visitors and healthcare providers. The researches findings have been published in the 'Health Environments Research and Design Journal'. Incredible impact of greenery around hospitals Jiang, an associate professor at the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, used immersive virtual environments, digitally created "worlds" in which users are engrossed, for a controlled experiment that asked participants to complete various wayfinding tasks. All participants saw the same hospital layout and room arrangements, however, for one group, participants encountered large windows and nature views among the corridor walls. The control group, on the other hand, saw solid walls without any daylight or nature views. Participants in the greenspace group took shorter time and walked less distance while completing their wayfinding tasks. Also Read | ​‘Chausar is biggest Punjabi political web series in history of Punjab’, says PTC MD Rabindra Narayan
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Incredible impact of greenery around hospitals "In terms of spatial orientation and wayfinding, window views of nature and small gardens can effectively break down the tedious interiors of large hospital blocks and serve as landmarks to aid people's wayfinding and improve their spatial experience," said the author of the study. According to the study's findings participants' mood states, particularly anger and confusion, also get "significantly relieved" due to the greenery and nature. The research also discovered that green spaces situated at key decision points, such as the main corridor or junction of departmental units, can serve as landmarks that positively attract attention, help wayfinding and improve the navigational experience among visitors, patients and even hospital staff. Incredible impact of greenery around hospitals Jiang found that gardens and plants tend to have strong therapeutic effects on people. "You may explain such therapeutic effects from multiple perspectives: people's colour/hue preferences tend to range from blue to green, nature and plants are positive distractions that could restore people's attentional fatigue, and human beings could have developed genetic preference of greenery from evolutionary perspectives," the researcher said; adding "All mechanisms together contribute to the positive experience when looking at gardens and nature views." Also Read | UP elections 2022: Lakhimpur Kheri that hit headlines over farmers' killing to vote on Feb 23 -PTC News-
mental-health hospitals nature hospitals-environment therapeutic-nature
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