Thinking about Healthcare Building and Environment Design in Terms of the Principles of Biomedical Ethics

The design of the healthcare environment focuses more and more on the protection and promotion of patients’ rights and well-being. However, architectural studies rarely discuss the definition of patients’ rights and well-being or summarize the mechanism of measures to realize it in medicine and nursing. In order to make a better understanding of patient’s rights and expand the thinking of design, we try to analyze and summarize the role of the healthcare environment from the perspective of biomedical ethics. The paper takes the four accepted principles of biomedical ethics given by Beauchamp and Childress (1979) namely (1) respect for autonomy, (2) nonmaleficence, (3) beneficence, (4) justice, as the basis for sorting the framework of healthcare environment design that aims to promote the patients’ rights and well-being. According to the relevant environment research results, the paper gives the influences that the physical environment can bring to the patients, and summaries the goals of healthcare environment design for the rights and interests of patients.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9