Therapeutic Landscape as a Healthcare Facility in Egypt: Design and Evaluation Process

Abstract

Outdoor natural environments are well proven to have psychological, physical, and social benefits, particularly those attached to healthcare facilities. Despite that, the Egyptian Codes devoid of data related to the design of such gardens, which hinders the design process and the inclusion of these spaces within health care facilities. Thus, this paper seeks to reach a set of considerations for the design of different types of therapeutic gardens by summarizing the findings and recommendations of some evidence-based design (EBD) research and post-occupancy evaluations (POEs). Post-occupancy evaluations lack to determining the percentage of achieving the design principles in the garden. Therefore, in addition to the behavioral and visual observations to evaluate Children's Cancer Hospital garden in Egypt (CCHE), an audit tool was integrated to combine the advantages of audit tools and POEs. With this merging, we can reach a steady form of post-occupancy evaluations of pediatric cancer hospital’s gardens to be a guide for future researches and landscape architects.