Impacts of hospitals users' characteristics on perceptions of the physical environment.

Recently hospital managers and designers become more interested in 'patient centered design' (PCD) through the integration of patients' perceptions and expectations of the hospitals' physical environment. This increased interest in PCD indicates the improved understanding of the impacts of hospital's physical environment on all users including patients, families and hospital staff. Literature shows that incorporating users' perceptions of the physical environment during the design process is very important to produce PCD. The current study is aimed at assessing the impacts of four demographic factors namely: age, sex, education level and area of residence on users' perceptions of hospitals' physical environment. Five principal design factors were identified: views, safety &comfort, facilities &way finding, architectural & hygiene and sensory. For the questionnaire survey, the statistical analysis has been conducted with IBM SPSS Statistics version 27.0. Demographic data was analyzed descriptively by computing frequencies and percentages. Then the descriptive statistics for the items i.e. frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations (SD) were computed. Non-parametric tests were applied to assess variances in constructed principal dimensions concerning users' demographic factors. The users of two hospitals: Nekemte specialized hospital & Paulos comprehensive hospital participated in the survey. A total of 480 respondents were participated in ranking the importance of 21 questionnaire items on 5-point Likert scale. The result reveals that education level has a significance role (p-value = 00.001,00.002,0.032) for the difference between perceptions of three out of five summated design factors namely; views, facilities & way finding and architectural& hygiene respectively. Similarly, residence area has significantly contributed for the difference in users' perceptions (-value = 00.001, 00.001, 0.025) on three summated design factors; views, safety &comfort and architectural & hygiene respectively. Based on the analysis, the study suggests that identifying perceptions of all users is very important to help designers to design PCD based on empirical evidence.