Lighting
What does a Tuesday afternoon feel like?
Most care home lighting is designed for the people who work there, says Michael Bamling, who makes the case for configuring it for the people who live in them, and outlines practical principles that can change their daily experience.
My main work is in residential environments: how light shapes the experience of being at home and how it supports or disrupts the body across the day. When I began looking at care settings through that lens, a question kept returning. One that I think is worth putting to anyone responsible for a building where people spend most of their time: What does a Tuesday afternoon feel like to someone who cannot leave the building? To put this in context, I’m not thinking
of a difficult or exceptional Tuesday. I’m thinking of an ordinary afternoon in the middle of an ordinary week. What does that feel like when the building is your only environment? When there is no walk to take, no errand to run, no natural change of scene to reset the day? For most of us, the built environment is
background. We move through it, we leave it, we return to it. Our sense of time and rhythm is shaped by the world outside as much as the rooms we inhabit. For a person living in a long-term care environment,
that equation is reversed. The building is everything. And within the building, one of the most powerful forces shaping how they experience time, mood, and wellbeing is also one of the least discussed. And that is light. Not the fittings. Not the scheme. But the behaviour of light across the day. How it changes, where it comes from, what it asks of the body at each hour, and whether the environment uses that behaviour deliberately, or simply ignores it. Most care environments ignore it. And people who live in them carry the cost.
What research tells us Most people in care management aren’t aware that the evidence in this area is substantial. Studies have found that people in care settings receive as little as ten to nineteen minutes of adequate light exposure per day. In those with with dementia, the figure drops to around one minute. Healthy adults of any age receive roughly an hour of light sufficient to support the body’s internal regulatory system, so the amount people
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www.thecarehomeenvironment.com June 2026
who live in care homes are receiving is only a fraction of the recommended amount. The consequences of this deficit of
light are measurable and recognisable to anyone working in care. Disturbed sleep. Increased agitation as the evening approaches. Elevated rates of depression. Reduced daytime alertness and engagement. And a significantly elevated fall risk. One study that upgraded care home lighting by incorporating brighter, spectrally appropriate light during the day and lower, warmer light overnight, recorded a meaningful reduction in fall rates. This was not a clinical intervention, a pharmaceutical change, or a staffing adjustment. It was considered lighting. The physical environment was the intervention. The relationship between light and the
body’s internal clock is not a new science. The circadian system, the biological mechanism that regulates sleep, alertness, mood, appetite, and dozens of other physiological processes, is set primarily by light. Morning light of sufficient brightness
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