For real estate with sustainable and shared benefits

The waiting room is often perceived as a simple place of transit, almost mundane. However, it plays a much more important role than it seems: it influences patients' state of mind, their stress levels, and even their perception of the quality of care and the establishment. Research in management science and psychology has long shown that the physical environment shapes our feelings (Bitner, 1992). The waiting room, the first concrete contact with the medical world, is no exception to this rule (DCunha et al., 2021). Lighting, comfort, seating arrangement, ambient noise... all these details, when taken together, create a unique experience. It is this often underestimated role that we wanted to focus on. To do so, we conducted two successive studies—one qualitative, the other quantitative—which shed additional light on how the layout of a space influences the patient experience.