This year's Day of Intensive Care Medicine was held under the motto Zurück ins Leben — "Back to Life." The panel deliberately shifted the focus away from devices, numbers, and waveforms and toward the people who actually experience critical care: patients, their families, and the interprofessional teams who accompany them.
At the center of the discussion was the story of Cornelia Sichermann, who survived life-threatening sepsis and spent six months in hospital before finding her way back into everyday life. She was joined by a family member and by colleagues from medicine, nursing, and psychology — a constellation that made visible how differently the same intensive care unit is perceived from the bed, from the bedside chair, and from the professional side of the room.
The excerpt we are publishing here concentrates on one thread of that conversation: how intensive care units and patient rooms are designed, and why that design is a clinical variable rather than an aesthetic afterthought.
Survivors consistently describe an environment that is disorienting by construction — continuous artificial light, unrelenting alarm and machine noise, no line of sight to a window, no reliable cue as to whether it is day or night, and few opportunities for privacy or autonomy. These are not comfort issues at the margins of intensive care. They map directly onto mechanisms with established relevance for outcome: fragmented and architecturally abnormal sleep, disrupted circadian organization, delirium, and the cognitive, affective, and physical sequelae summarized as Post-Intensive Care Syndrome. The environment in which critical illness is treated shapes what patients carry with them long after discharge.
The panel therefore argued for two things at once, and insisted that they belong together. First, the patient and family perspective must enter the design process early — not as feedback collected after a unit is built, but as a source of requirements alongside hygiene, workflow, and technology. Second, environmental interventions deserve the same evidential standard as any other intervention in intensive care. Dynamic lighting, acoustic control, daylight and view, room layout, and multisensory design are testable concepts. They should be evaluated prospectively, with defined endpoints, so that "healing architecture" becomes an evidence-based part of critical care rather than a well-intentioned claim.
High-performance medicine and humanity are not competing priorities. Technology and communication, monitoring and dignity, protocol and presence — the discussion made a persuasive case that these are two halves of the same standard of care, and that the built environment is where the two most visibly meet.
This work sits at the core of our research program on sleep, circadian biology, and the built environment in the ICU. We invite clinicians, researchers, architects, and designers to watch the excerpt and to get in touch.
The recording is in German with English subtitles.