Sustainable healing and therapeutic design driven well-being in hospital environment

Despite the growing awareness of healing hospitals, they are still far from being globally widespread, and traditional hospital building models are increasingly unable to address the serious resource constraints and environmental stresses that we face today. In addition, sustainable development concepts have become key driving forces in the construction process of healing buildings. Currently, while research on healing hospital design continues to grow, there is relatively little that specifically addresses the integration of sustainable development concepts. Hence, this paper aims to explore the current state of development and knowledge structure of sustainable healing and therapeutic design (HTD) in hospital scenarios using a systematic methodology that integrates macro-quantitative bibliometric analysis and follow-up micro-qualitative content analysis methods based on data from the Web of Science (WOS) database, which investigates eight research objectives, including the background, current state, hotspots, high-frequency words, integration with sustainable development goals (SDGs), particularly SDG3, “Ensure healthy lifestyles and promote well-being of people of all ages”, and the challenges posed by public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 era, for sustainable HTD in hospitals. This paper identified six main clusters: the environment of a hospital, mental health, quality of life, illness and care, COVID-19, and wound healing. These clusters were taken from keyword network visualization analysis, emphasizing key terms focused on wound healing, mental health, quality of life, nursing, children, and evidence-based design via high-frequency keyword analysis. These have been further grouped into three categories: strategy, approach, and method. Subsequently, this paper further explores how hospital HTD relates to SDG 3 targeted on reducing child mortality (SDG 3.2), promoting mental health and physical health (SDG 3.4), and achieving universal health coverage (SDG 3.8) to explore wound healing, mental health, quality of life, nursing, and children, which are stressed in the results of both macro-quantitative bibliometric and follow-up micro-qualitative content analyses. In addition, it is shown that more changes should be made to sustainable hospital HTD in the context of the pandemic era to cope with unpredictable crises. Finally, the expression HTD is discussed to justify the keywords. The results of this study complement sustainable hospital HTD and provide assistance to future architects, policy makers, and healthcare professionals.