Samaritan Health Services – Healing Environments Master Plan

The Healing Environment Master Plan was developed to guide the Samaritan Health Services facilities in the provision of healing environments on a system-wide basis and delivered site specific needs.  Understanding what constitutes a “healing garden” is the foundation of this plan.

A philosophy was developed to identify these “Each of the Samaritan Health Systems facilities incorporates healing principles into the environment, ensuring the presence of tranquility, beauty, comfort, and safety for the benefit of patients, families, visitors and staff.  Now we were able to identify the different types of healing environments like; Borrowed Landscape, Covered Garden, Front Entry, Landscape Grounds, Meditation Gardens, Healing Gardens, Therapeutic Gardens and etc.

Each of five community hospitals and two senior communities were visited and evaluated with regard to the condition of the landscape, the access to nature and what kinds of healing environments existed and were lacking.

The Master Plan developed a system-wide action plan which identified healing gardens, healing environment and specific opportunities to be pursued that elevate the level of healing environment development throughout the system.  These were then costed out and prioritized so that funding sources could be identified.