Healing Hospital: A Daring Paradigm

Healing Hospital: A Daring Paradigm

Grand Canyon University: HLT-310V

Healing hospitals contain three main components, a healing physical environment, the integration of work design and technology, and a culture of radical loving care (Eberst, 2008). Spirituality is the religion or the individual’s identified experience in relation to their reality. The healing hospital philosophy incorporates the physical body with the spiritual mind and spirit of the individual to provide the best care possible.

A healing physical environment provides care to the mind, body, and spirit. This begins with the right culture in place. Health care professionals must contain the core beliefs of compassion for the patient, a servant’s attitude, and a recognition and action towards meeting the patient’s emotional and spiritual needs. The facility’s design must take into the consideration the three components of the individual. It needs to allow easy access for the patient, provide privacy and protection, and promote complete wellness for the individual. Technology is important as health care advances into the future. It can provide better access to education to the patient, timely service enabling quicker treatment and increased time available to address the emotional and spiritual needs of the patient, and better diagnostic and interventional treatments to treat both mind and body.

Healing environments in hospitals are challenged by cynicism and spirituality, business and economics, and the bureaucracy and leadership in hospitals. Cynicism infects the health care workplace as some people don’t believe that creating a healing environment improves the patient outcome or don’t feel that is important aspect of the health care model (Chapman, 2007). The idea of incorporating spirituality poses a conflict in the way health care professionals sometimes think. In the past we were taught that religion, as what we defined as spirituality, was to be separated from the workplace (Ashcraft, Anthony, & Mancuso, 2010).

Health care has ballooned into a large part of the United States of America’s economy occupying in 2001 13% of the gross national product; this in turn has led to health care being looked at as a business (Chapman, 2007). The health care businesses and the government must look at the cost and profitability to keep health care access viable or keep the shareholders happy. This can lead to an increase in patient to nurse ratio, quicker discharges, tight hospital budgets, and increased out of pocket expense to the individual. As described by Laurie Eberst “A loud floor cleaning machine swooped next to my mother’s room startling her and causing increased anxiety” (Eberst, 2008). Hospitals and health care facilities are sometimes faced with tight budget constraints leading many to choose between necessary

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