LIGHTING


staff overnight, and natural daylight should always be the starting point for every design. The healthcare teams who are seeing


the greatest return on their investment today consider the lighting as part of an integrated approach to an environment that actively supports the day-night cycle through a combination of technology and behaviour. This includes technologies such as interactive games to encourage physical and mental activity, acoustic monitoring, and other sensing systems to maintain safety while minimising night- time disruption, tailored lighting zones with personal control for patients and staff, alongside staff training and simple adjustments such as placing furniture near windows to optimise daytime light exposure, using black-out curtains to protect darkness at night, ensuring residents and staff spend time outside, and adjusting the night-time routine to minimise disruption: ‘wide-awake clubs’ in a separate part of the facility for example.


Faced with a dilemma This leaves the busy hospital or care home engineering or other specifier with a dilemma: whether to settle for ‘business as usual’ minimum legal standards, or embrace this new understanding of the non-visual effects of light and invest in a higher specification with associated


money, reducing the cost of medication, length of stay, and staff turnover. One study in a residential care home in Calgary, Canada, found that circadian lighting reduced daytime napping and improved the quality of sleep at night, while reducing sedative medication.6


in two residential care homes found a 43% reduction in falls under circadian compared with standard lighting conditions.7 Another project – in a specialist


Sophisticated control systems give considerable flexibility to adjust lighting levels to suit the setting and patient.


upfront costs and the inevitable time and effort needed to think ‘outside the box’. A growing number of large-scale academic studies, backed up by the experience of individual healthcare providers, are demonstrating that, as part of a broader strategic decision to invest in a healthy circadian cycle, these lighting solutions, especially those that harness daylight, can deliver outstanding value for


recovery clinic for heart attacks – noted a 21% reduction in medication costs for patients with rooms on the bright side of the hospital, compared with those on the darker side of the same building.8 At the other end of the age scale, pre- term infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit gained weight more quickly, and went home sooner, under circadian conditions than with standard continuous exposure.9


If one considers


staff satisfaction, dynamic lighting has been shown to stabilise circadian cycles and mood in night-shift workers.10


Simple,


low-cost interventions on the wards and at nursing stations at night, such as access to switches and dimmers, and blue-depleted wireless light ‘pods’, instead of turning on the overhead lights, improved caregiver satisfaction while reducing patient anxiety.11,12


Another large-scale project


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Technology for those who care


September 2024 Health Estate Journal 35


Photo courtesy of Chromaviso


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