Animal hospitals have radically improved over our lifetimes, boosted by greater knowledge about medicine and best practices. Yet, we continue to have much to learn about the physical and psychological comfort of pets in care. Dogs and cats' unique sensory abilities can inform and inspire our design choices and help us develop creative solutions.
Focusing on how animals experience the world, we can better design veterinary spaces to support how animals hear, see, smell, and touch their environments. Adapting hospitals to help the animals' experiences can reduce stress, make handling of animals easier, improve behavior, and provide comfort.
This, in turn, can have a lasting impact on the humans who care for them. Like the animals being cared for, designing a healing environment can also lower the stress of your clients and team members. It can also generate more business by focusing on caring for your practice, which can set you apart from your competition.
Here are some crucial aspects to focus on when creating a healing environment:
- Hand hygiene: Good hand hygiene helps prevent infectious diseases from spreading between your patients.
- Decluttering: A tidy hospital is one where things are easy to find, surfaces are clear and ready to serve as a place to perform tasks, and there are no tripping hazards.
- Drainage: Proper drainage supports protocols that make cleaning tasks easier for your staff and significantly impact infection control.
- Lighting design impacts what pets can see clearly (see article below).
- Noise reduction decreases stress in patients and clients (see article below).
- Indoor Air Quality: Good indoor air quality will reduce the odors that can add to animal stress and people’s stress. A clean and sanitized hospital is one with a neutral smell. Cats get fearful when they smell dogs, and no one enjoys the smell of poop or anal glands.
Healing environments can also incorporate the concepts of Fear Free design. Fear-free or lower-stress environments are designed to help reduce the fear, anxiety, and stress that animals commonly feel in unfamiliar and veterinary environments. Essential considerations include species separation throughout the hospital, providing enrichments, reducing or eliminating waiting (which is often just an opportunity for anxiety to build), easily accessible equipment, like recessed scales, and opportunities to create more comfortable environments, like outdoor exam rooms or waiting areas (see article below).
