Stress and the Dental Office: The Role of Waiting Room Design

Kennedy McKay (School of Architecture University of Illinois)
Kathryn H. Anthony (School of Architecture - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Background: For far too many patients, a trip to the dentist can cause severe anxiety even before they set foot in the office. This can be for a variety of reasons, but for medical staff at dental offices, maximizing patient comfort and satisfaction should be paramount. Understanding how the design of the dental office waiting room relates to patients’ emotional comfort and stress is a key concern. Although research can be found on environment-behavior issues in the design of waiting rooms in doctors’ offices, not much research is available on the design of dental offices.

Aim: How does the design of dental office waiting rooms increase or decrease patients’ levels of stress?Methods: An online survey was distributed through Facebook. The survey included quantitative and qualitative questions, including references to specific dental office designs that either induced or relieved stress. Images of these dentists’ offices were collected from their respective websites. A total of 44 responses were received.

Results: Many participants reported attributes of the waiting rooms that increased or decreased stress, underscoring the relationship between patients’ emotional comfort and aspects of the physical environment. The predominant response to attributes that increase stress and create a poor waiting room is a small, cramped space that does not allow for privacy.

Conclusions: Building upon research in medical waiting rooms in other contexts, this study found that a small space and lack of privacy makes dental patients unhappy and stressed, implying that a more open waiting room that still allows for a certain level of privacy is a better design solution to help alleviate patient stress.