A breakthrough study reveals that hospital room design and location affect chances of survival after high-risk surgery. University of Michigan researchers found that having a hospital room with a window view, staying in a single room, and being in closer proximity to a nursing station, positively influence patient outcomes after serious surgical operations.

According to Study Finds, previous research has linked proximity to nurses and having a room with a window could affect patient outcomes. The new study aimed to examine if certain hospital room features, including single or double occupancy and windows, would affect length of stay and mortality of surgical patients.

“We were fascinated to see from a previous study that mortality was different in rooms that were in the line of sight of a nurse’s station. Nurses could more readily assess the patient’s condition and intervene more quickly in severe events. We wanted to see how this finding would play out at our institution, specifically in a surgical population,” said study coauthor Mitchell J. Mead, a health and design scholar at the University of Michigan. “One of the next big steps for healthcare design is to understand these pathways of causation that can lead to different clinical outcomes in patients staying in hospital rooms with different features.”

The analysis for this study involved 3,964 patients who underwent 13 high-risk surgical procedures including colectomy, pancreatectomy, and kidney transplant at the University of Michigan Hospital between 2016 and 2019, says a news release. The patients were admitted to rooms on two hospital floors.

Patient rooms were coded according to their features — windows, no windows, single occupancy, double occupancy, distance to the nursing station, and line of sight to clinicians. Patients were linked by room number to identify clinical outcomes, including mortality and length of stay, related to room design.

After adjusting for patient comorbidities and complexity of the surgery, mortality rates were 20% higher if patients were admitted to a hospital room without a window than if they were put into a room with a window. For patients in windowless rooms, the 30-day mortality rate was 10% higher.

“This investigation provided evidence that patients had differential outcomes across room design features, when accounting for clinical risk, and warrants further investigation on how hospital design may be influencing outcomes,” said Mead. Since approximately $50 billion is spent each year on the construction of healthcare facilities in the United States, the new research can shed light on how architecture and interior design can enhance patient care.

While the authors of the study acknowledge that it would be impractical to redesign or rebuild hospitals, their results show that prioritizing the sickest patients in choice hospital rooms may help them get the right care and improve surgical outcomes. They also said, according to the news release, that further studies should investigate their research in multiple hospitals to confirm the validity of the results.