Health sciences schools can support student well-being by designing the campus as a connected learning and support system rather than a collection of classrooms. A useful plan combines quiet and collaborative study areas, technology-rich library spaces, places to rehearse clinical skills, convenient food and drink, health and fitness facilities, counseling, and student services that are easy to find and use.
These are planning recommendations, not proven interventions. HDR’s January 11, 2022 practitioner article in Building Design + Construction presents design ideas and examples, but it does not report a controlled comparison showing that a particular room type or amenity causes better mental-health outcomes. The design brief should therefore pair good environmental decisions with accessible professional care, clear operations, and evaluation after opening.
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What a well-being-focused health sciences campus is designed to do
Health sciences students move between lectures, laboratories, clinical placements, group projects, exams, and sometimes paid or family responsibilities. Their work requires concentration, teamwork, technology access, physical practice, and frequent contact with faculty and support staff. A campus that offers only standard classrooms forces all of those activities into the same setting.
The HDR article recommends a wider ecosystem: different places to study, libraries that support active learning, everyday necessities that are available at useful times, and services that students can locate without guesswork. The goal is not to turn architecture into therapy. It is to remove avoidable friction from learning and make help reachable when a student needs it.
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In practical terms, a project brief should ask six questions:
- Can students choose between quiet individual work and more active settings?
- Can they collaborate, charge devices, and reach instructors when questions arise?
- Is there a place to practise clinical skills outside scheduled class time?
- Are physical and mental-health services visible, welcoming, and easy to reach?
- Can students obtain affordable food and drink during the hours they actually study?
- Do online and in-person instructions make enrollment, tuition, peer engagement, housing connections, and other services understandable?
These questions are a synthesis of the recommendations in HDR’s article, not a formally validated assessment tool.
Provide a deliberate mix of learning environments
Quiet spaces for individual work
Students need places for reading, writing, reviewing images, and preparing for examinations without the noise or social expectations of a group room. Include a range of individual settings rather than one large silent room: enclosed rooms for people who need strong acoustic separation, smaller carrels, and quieter seats near shared resources. The exact room counts, dimensions, acoustic ratings, and furniture standards are not specified in the HDR article, so they must come from enrollment, scheduling, accessibility, and local facilities standards.
Rooms for collaboration and visibility
Group rooms should support case discussions, problem-based learning, and peer teaching. Glazed fronts or other visibility strategies can help students understand whether a room is occupied and allow staff to see activity without interrupting it. Writable surfaces, screens, robust power, and furniture that can be rearranged support different teaching patterns. Provide a mix of bookable rooms and informal tables so a student does not need a reservation for every conversation.
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HDR specifically calls for charging capacity. Treat power as basic infrastructure: distribute outlets where students actually sit, provide data or strong wireless coverage for the planned applications, and make cable management safe. A charging strategy should include accessible-height outlets and work surfaces, not just floor boxes hidden beneath furniture. Technology requirements should be coordinated with the library, information-technology, and disability-support teams before furniture is purchased.
Clinical-skills practice outside class
The article recommends opportunities for clinical-skills practice beyond scheduled teaching. A practice zone might include reservable skills rooms, open rehearsal areas, storage for models, and nearby hand-washing and cleaning provisions where applicable. Scheduling, supervision, equipment maintenance, and infection-control procedures matter as much as the room. If after-hours access is offered, define who can enter, how equipment is checked, and how students obtain help; an unlocked room without operating rules is not a dependable service.
Make the health sciences library an active-learning hub
A library can do more than provide shelves and individual desks. HDR describes technology-rich libraries with teaching rooms and maker or experimental spaces as examples of how information services can support active learning. A library program can therefore combine:
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- Collections and digital access points for course and clinical information.
- Teaching rooms for information-literacy sessions, demonstrations, and small classes.
- Collaborative rooms near, but acoustically separated from, quiet study areas.
- Maker or experimental spaces where permitted activities can be supervised safely.
- Technology support and charging integrated into the seating plan.
Adjacency is important. Students should not have to cross an entire building to move from a group assignment to a reference consultation or a teaching session. At the same time, noisy fabrication or experimental work should not undermine concentrated study. Libraries and architects should map sound, equipment, supervision, storage, and opening-hour requirements together rather than treating each zone as an isolated fit-out.
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Put everyday necessities within reach
Food and drink
The planning argument in HDR’s article includes food and drink that are convenient, inexpensive, and available. That recommendation concerns access, not a particular vendor or product. A campus may need more than one option: a staffed outlet during core hours, self-service or vending when the building remains open, drinking-water points, and seating where students can eat without occupying a silent study zone. Hours, payment methods, dietary information, cleaning, waste handling, and affordability should be written into the operating brief.
Health and fitness facilities
Student health and fitness facilities can be located near daily circulation so that seeking care or exercising does not require a special trip across campus. Physical separation may still be needed for privacy, clinical operations, changing areas, and infection control. The facility plan should identify referral routes between health, fitness, counseling, disability support, and academic services, while preserving confidential conversations and records.
Counseling and mental-health access
Counseling should be easy to find and reach, with clear directions, accessible entrances, appropriate acoustic privacy, and waiting arrangements that respect confidentiality. Co-location can reduce the number of steps a student must take, but it does not by itself remove stigma or replace qualified clinical care. Service leadership must set appointment, crisis, after-hours, and referral procedures; the building is an enabler of those procedures, not their substitute.
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HDR recommends clear student services and instructions covering enrollment, tuition, peer engagement, housing connections, and directions to in-person services. Wayfinding should begin before a student arrives. Use consistent names and locations across the website, mobile pages, signs, room directories, maps, and email instructions. Avoid sending a student through several offices that use different labels for the same service.
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At the entrance, provide an obvious information point and a readable route to high-demand destinations. Signs should state the destination, floor, and direction; digital screens can add hours and temporary closures, but permanent signs should still work when a screen is unavailable. Test instructions with new students and with people who use mobility, visual, hearing, or cognitive-access tools. A service that exists but cannot be found is functionally inaccessible.
Use teaching culture to guide the environment
The design conversation can be connected to the educational purpose of the school. HDR’s article attributes three statements to Jeffrey Flier, then dean of Harvard Medical School, in a discussion of a revamped curriculum: “Education is not about transmission of information, it’s about transforming the learners”; “Three things make a great clinical educator: Think out loud, stick to the basics, and be kind”; and “Teach our students as though we might be teaching our own doctor.” The article links the wording to a September 25, 2015 Harvard Medical School webinar; the recording was not independently verified, so these should remain attributed quotations rather than presented as a verified transcript.
For architects and faculty, the practical implication is to design for interaction and humane teaching: rooms where instructors can model reasoning, spaces where students can ask questions without disrupting a lecture, and settings that make peer learning routine. Those choices support the curriculum’s social conditions without claiming that a particular layout produces kindness or better clinical judgment.
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When a school compares renovation, new construction, or phased improvements, use the same questions for every option. The following table turns the HDR recommendations into a project-planning lens; it is not a validated post-occupancy scorecard.
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| Planning dimension | Questions to ask | Evidence status |
|---|---|---|
| Focus and privacy | Are quiet individual seats and acoustically private rooms available alongside active settings? | Design recommendation; comparative outcomes are not reported. |
| Collaboration and visibility | Can students work in groups, use shared technology, and reach or see instructors when needed? | Design recommendation; no causal effect is established. |
| Practice access | Is there supervised, reservable space for clinical-skills practice outside scheduled classes? | Design recommendation; operating requirements must be set locally. |
| Support access | Can students find health, fitness, counseling, and other services without confusing routes? | Design and service-access recommendation. |
| Everyday convenience | Are food, drink, charging, and student-service information available at useful times and locations? | Design and operations recommendation. |
| Flexibility | Does the mix accommodate different learning preferences and activities without forcing every use into one room type? | Synthesis of the article’s recommendations, not a tested rubric. |
Move from concept to an actionable brief
- Set a shared definition of well-being. Bring academic leadership, student services, library staff, health and counseling professionals, facilities, information technology, accessibility specialists, and students into the brief. State which barriers the project can address and which require policy or clinical services.
- Map a student’s actual day. Document arrival, class changes, study, meals, clinical practice, appointments, and departure. Record where queues, long walks, lack of power, confusing signs, or incompatible opening hours create avoidable friction.
- Program spaces by activity. Translate enrollment and timetable data into quantities for quiet work, group work, teaching, library support, skills practice, food, health, fitness, counseling, storage, and service desks. Do not let a generic classroom count stand in for these different uses.
- Resolve adjacencies and separation. Place complementary services close enough to be convenient, while protecting acoustic privacy, confidential care, safe experimentation, and infection-control requirements.
- Design access rules with the rooms. Decide booking, walk-in, after-hours, supervision, cleaning, equipment, and emergency procedures before opening. Publish these rules in the same language used on signs and online.
- Prototype wayfinding and furniture. Use temporary signs, sample charging layouts, mock-up rooms, and student walk-throughs to identify failures before construction is complete. Include users with disabilities in every test.
- Commission the operations team. Train front-desk, library, health, counseling, security, and facilities staff on referrals and escalation. A well-designed route fails if staff cannot explain the next step.
- Evaluate after opening. Track room use, booking demand, opening-hour gaps, wayfinding questions, service wait times, equipment faults, and student feedback. Treat these as local performance indicators, not proof that a building caused a change in mental health.
What the mental-health evidence does—and does not—show
The rationale for planning support includes evidence about medical trainees, but those populations should not be treated as interchangeable with every health sciences student. Kathryn Baker and Srijan Sen’s 2016 review in the AMA Journal of Ethics reports historical figures from specific studies:
| Figure | Population and period | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| 28.8% with depression or depressive symptoms | 17,560 resident physicians in a meta-analysis published in 2015 | A historical estimate for resident physicians, reported in the 2016 review; not a current universal rate for health sciences students. |
| 51.5% experiencing burnout | 16,192 internal medicine residents in a multicenter study during the 2008–2009 academic year | A historical study result for internal medicine residents; it should not be generalized to all learners or all years. |
Read the full review at Baker and Sen’s “Healing Medicine’s Future: Prioritizing Physician Trainee Mental Health”. The review says the literature consistently found a correlation between burnout, distress, and fatigue and the frequency of perceived or self-reported medical errors. That is an association with potential patient-care relevance, not proof that burnout causes an error in an individual case.
HDR’s article also says that more than one quarter of medical students experience depression, but the article does not provide a study citation beside that statement. It should not be reused as a precise statistic without checking the underlying study. More broadly, the figures above explain why accessible support deserves attention; they do not demonstrate that a library, café, fitness room, or co-located counseling service independently improves mental health.
Avoid common design and implementation mistakes
- Building one “flexible” room for everything. Flexibility does not eliminate the need for genuinely quiet, collaborative, clinical, and confidential settings.
- Providing amenities without hours or staffing. Food, practice rooms, libraries, and counseling routes need dependable operating plans.
- Hiding support services behind a maze of signs. Clear labels, consistent maps, and trained staff are part of the service.
- Assuming co-location removes stigma. Preserve privacy and pair convenient locations with confidential, clinically appropriate care.
- Using historical trainee statistics as a campus forecast. Keep the population, sample, year, and measure attached to every number.
- Claiming a causal wellness benefit from an attractive space. Describe the feature as a way to improve access, choice, or usability unless local evaluation establishes more.
Design for choice, access, and care together
A health sciences campus supports well-being when a student can find an appropriate place to study, practise, eat, recharge, ask for help, and reach professional services without unnecessary barriers. The strongest brief connects those choices to curriculum, staffing, hours, accessibility, and evaluation. It also keeps the evidence boundary clear: the facilities described by HDR are thoughtful design strategies, while the mental-health statistics from Baker and Sen describe particular trainee populations and historical studies, not guaranteed outcomes for every health sciences student.
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