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SPOTLIGHT LANDSCAPE HEALING GARDENS A focal point of shaping healthcare landscapes for cancer patients By Michelle Pinkston Ohle ust months after the opening of a $190-million expansion to University Hospital by University of Missouri Health Care, a poignant moment graced the project's healing garden — a wedding for a terminally-ill patient. "That was worth the price of the building," said Dr. Paul Dale, M.D., the interim medical director of the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center and chief of the surgical oncology division at MU Health Care. "Without the garden, he may not have been able to get married." The benefits of introducing nature to the healing process are well documented. For cancer patients, the calming outdoor environment allows for meditation and exercise, improving the ability to tolerate chemotherapy. Doctors know that patients with a connection to nature have lower blood pressure, which speeds the healing process. Patients are calmer and happier when connected to the outdoors, decreasing their time spent in the hospital. But MU Health Care saw it as so much more. It would be a focal point of healing. It embraced a highly collabora- J The Ellis Fischel Gala and the Brown Family Healing Garden became a centerpiece of the $190-million expansion of University Hospital by University of Missouri Health Care in Columbia, Mo. tive process with the design team to make the healing garden a centerpiece of the expansion. The level of clarity achieved was so great that the original sketches and final healing garden are almost identical. Remarkably, about 95 percent of the initial design was retained and implemented. "The uniqueness of it was very clear. Every time the healing garden was shown, people liked it," said Dr. Dale. "This was important to us and 18 Medical Construction & Design | November/December 2013 important to our patients. We knew we had to have it. Good drawings sold the design at every step of the process." Coming to a consensus on the vision is important because, while healing environments have been clearly studied and explored within the building walls, their movement outside these boundaries can be much less cut and dry. Often, large medical campuses have very little space for outdoor healing environments. It is precisely these spaces, however, that can have such a large impact on patients, visitors and employees when maintained and appropriately designed and developed. Hence, another intense level of planning is unfolding at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif. in a major landscape master planning process that includes a healing garden to fit an urban setting. In Indianapolis, Ind., a healing garden is helping shape a unique vision of Eskenazi Health for a new safety net medical campus offering healthcare to the underserved. MU Health Care creates a centerpiece The MU Health Care project features the 310,500-squarefoot University of Missouri Patient Care Tower and a new location for the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center in Columbia, Mo. Combined with the existing medical facility, it encloses an 80-by-65 healing garden courtyard that serves www.mcdmag.com