Hospitals and healthcare facilities are known to be among the most energyintensive buildings. This concern has resulted in a resurgence of sustainability awareness in the built environment. Nowadays, many have adopted environmental strategies such as natural ventilation. It offers a low-cost alternative to remove stale air and replace fresh air efficiently through cross ventilation. Studies have shown that natural ventilation is one of the most energyefficient solutions to improve thermal comfort and hospitals and healthcare facilities will greatly benefit from this initiative. Passive Design has been valued as a key strategy in controlling airborne infection, especially in hospital wards with limited resources. Comparatively, the installation of ceiling-mounted mechanical fans will create a negative ventilation pressure difference. This paper explores the potential of the passive design method based on the experience of inpatient ward users. The study utilised questionnaires based on the end user's experience in a naturally ventilated inpatient ward area. The survey administration method ensures the 51 respondents’ anonymity is preserved especially in a healthcare setting. This investigation shows that natural ventilation provides a higher ventilation rate and is more energy-efficient than mechanical ventilation. Therefore, natural ventilation is a suitable solution in public buildings such as hospitals' inpatient wards. The outcome of this study will be paramount for designers to meet passive design objectives. Consequently, these will be the guidelines and outline information for hospital design in the future.

This study touches on passive design elements used at the preparatory design stage of public hospital in Malaysia. Passive design is an aspect of sustainable architecture that needs to be understood and adopted in an environmentally sensitive architectural design. The most common problem is that the designers do not have proper guidelines for passive design to help them in designing a public hospital. Currently there is no comprehensive guidelines on passive design or sustainable architecture that may help designers. This consequently affects the increase of energy usage in hospitals. The intent of this study is to furnish evidence that the initial process of systematic design and guidance is essential in planning for a sustainable public hospital environment. In this study, the researcher uses a mixed method to obtain outcome for guideline. Through this method, a combination of qualitative and quantitative metadata to foster effective interventions to improve the quality of environmental friendly hospital design. The conclusions obtained from this study are to assist in the process of more efficient public hospital design. In addition to making these passive design guidelines as helpful in providing explanations and working to ensure that the guideline produced has credibility and meet the criteria.