Abstract
Introduction
Creating a comforting environment is essential for delivering psychiatric care. While healthcare organisations explicitly implement care models and adapt the physical environment, attention to staff’s implicit everyday practice is limited.
Aim
Developing a design anthropology approach tailored specifically to the research site, we examine the social and physical environment to unpack how staff integrate both ‐ implicit comforting interventions, and the explicit measures taken by the organisation ‐ into their everyday practices of psychiatric care.
Method
Design and sensory ethnography, using extended observations and ‘walking tours’ were undertaken with 126 staff members. A thematic analysis was conducted on all visual and audio material.
Results
Staff’s everyday implicit care practices and situated design decisions provide a comforting environment for patients, visitors, and staff.
Discussion
Implicit practices combine with an explicit organisational model of care to achieve a comforting environment. The value of design anthropology to uncover these dynamics is emphasised. Comforting practice involving implicit gestures of courtesy, which are infrequently addressed within organisational models of care (e.g. Safewards), are foregrounded.
Implications for practice
Explicit models of care have clear value in generating comfort; however, psychiatric hospital care also benefits from less visible modes of delivering comfort through everyday practices. By acknowledging both explicit and implicit modes of comfort, we can better understand how care models and psychiatric cultures of care are nurtured. Continuous ‘small’ but intentional acts of care (e.g. brief interactions in corridors and at doors) constitute a finely tuned repertoire of everyday comforting practices.