This blog explores how the environment of care influences the patient’s experience and staff well-being, with a focus on how sound, visual atmosphere, pacing, and sensory load shape healing and outcomes in healthcare settings. Topics include patient safety and satisfaction, hospital noise, nurse wellness, HCAHPS, sleep, and much more. Our goal is to share practical insights to help you create environments that heal.
March 5, 2026
HCAHPS has long measured how patients perceive their hospital experience. Recent updates to the survey expand both the content being measured and how responses are collected
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May 1, 2015
In the beginning, humans made up stories to explain the mystery of life. And, while we may call it mythology, whatever we have come to believe is more about the story
Read more >April 24, 2015
In the early 1970s, I was performing at the Ben Jonson Restaurant in San Francisco. This Lawry’s establishment bragged of its Elizabethan decor directly imported from England representing the life
Read more >April 17, 2015
So much discussion and concern about staff burnout in healthcare. So many definitions and descriptions. Actually, an entire symptomology of burnout has been written, rewritten, analyzed, and then written again.
Read more >April 10, 2015
If I told you that I had invented the chocolate chip cookie, what would you think? That I had lost it, or was delusional? Because chocolate chip cookies predate written
Read more >April 3, 2015
According to a recent report from the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare, “Healthcare organizations that show a commitment to compassion enjoy a better bottom line as well as increased patient and caregiver
Read more >March 27, 2015
The issue of a single or double patient room remains not only in discussion but in operation. While research has shown the benefits of single-patient rooms, many hospitals that have
Read more >March 13, 2015
The topic of end of life care has been on many of our minds recently. Last week I wrote about the choice between “do not resuscitate” (DNR) and “allow natural death”
Read more >March 8, 2015
The practices of end of life care globally are trapped in semantics, cultural demons, and fear. The term “do not resuscitate” or DNR, has not been around for hundreds of years.
Read more >February 27, 2015
The professionalism and dedication of nursing began in times of war. Florence Nightingale and her team of 35 nurses confronted a 42% mortality rate in the Crimea in the 1800s.
Read more >February 20, 2015
Note: My energies are focused on the Middle Eastern Nurses Conference this week, so here’s an encore post that was first published in March 2014. It’s time that we move from hypothesizing
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