THE ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE IN WAYFINDING PERFORMANCE IN HOSPITAL BUILDINGS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Tertiary hospitals are large scale, complicated healthcare facilities due to their purposeful organisations’ complexity and architectural configuration. As such, these buildings are not able to support the psychological needs of first time patients and visitors who are unfamiliar with the hospital environment. In hospitals, people do not have time and energy to waste in looking for destinations. Accordingly, architectural design of the hospital environment should be efficient in wayfinding performance in order to ensure users’ psychological satisfaction, comfort, and safety in order to improve staff productivity in the hospital. This research focuses on the roles of architectural features in providing information for spatial legibility in the hospital wayfinding process. The architectural features examined in the study are floor plan, pathways (circulation), landmark and signage. The case study was carried out at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital (UATH), Gwagwalada, Abuja FCT. The unit of analysis are buildings of General Outpatients Departments, Laboratory unit, Radiology and Pharmacy departments. The findings have shown the role of the architectural features in the legibility of the hospital environment as it affects wayfinding performance.