Lighting the Patient Room of the Future: Evaluating Different Lighting Conditions for Performing Typical Nursing Tasks

Abstract

Purpose: This study explores how aspects of lighting in patient rooms are experienced and evaluated by nurses while performing simulated work under various lighting conditions. The lighting conditions studied represent design standards consistent with different environments of care—traditional, contemporary, and future. Background: Recent advances in lighting research and technology create opportunities to use lighting in hospital rooms to improve everyday experience and provide researchers with opportunities to explore a new set of research questions about the effects of lighting on patients, guests, and staff. This study focuses on the experience of nurses delivering simulated patient care. Method: Perceptions of each of the 13 lighting conditions were evaluated by nurses using rating scales for difficulty of task completion, comfort, intensity, appropriateness of the lighting color, and naturalness of the lighting during the task. The nurses’ ratings were analyzed alongside qualitative reflections to provide insight into their responses. Results: Significant differences were found for several a priori hypotheses. Interesting findings provide insight into lighting to support circadian synchronization, lighting at night, the distribution of light in the patient room and the use of multiple lighting zones, and the use of colored lighting. Conclusion: The results of this study provide insight into potential benefits and concerns of these new features for patient room lighting systems and reveal gaps in the existing evidence base that can inform future investigations.

Lighting the Patient Room of the Future: Evaluating Different Lighting Conditions From the Patient Perspective

“…Condition 6 represents a typical midday condition. Table 3 shows the MI and CS values for each of these lighting conditions; the full SPD data for the calculations were provided in an earlier paper (Graves et al, 2021). The relative SPDs are shown graphically in Figure 3.…”

“…This sample size was determined based on expectations that it would provide sufficient power for the types of statistical analyses planned to evaluate the participants’ results. Uttley (2019) showed that samples of 25–35 subjects provide sufficient statistical power to detect most large and medium effects in within-subjects experimental research, and in the prior experiment conducted by this team, significant differences in perceptions of the participants were successfully revealed with 33 subjects (Graves et al, 2021).…”

“…The experiment described in this article is the second experiment in a research program aimed at exploring how various aspects of patient room lighting systems are experienced and evaluated by patients, visitors, and staff in inpatient hospital settings. While the first experiment studied nurses (Graves et al, 2021), this second experiment focused on understanding how people serving in the role of patients perceive lighting conditions in a patient room space, with specific interest in understanding patients’ perceptions of bright cool-tone lighting that may help synchronize patient circadian rhythms, patients’ perceptions of the various environments of care simulated with the lighting, and their perceptions of colored lighting introduced into the room.…”

“…The experimental setup, shown in Figure 1, included a hospital patient room mock-up, located within a larger laboratory and office space, identical to the set up used in Graves et al (2021). 1).…”

“…The acceptability of lighting technologies is contingent on user assessments of the light quality within specific environmental applications ( Assessment of Solid-State Lighting , 2017). In an earlier paper, we reported the results of an experiment that explored how aspects of lighting in patient rooms were experienced and evaluated by nurses while performing simulated work in a mock-up patient room with tunable LED lighting (Graves et al, 2021). In this article, we explore the patients’ perspective to see how those same conditions affect patient experiences.…”