Measured and perceived indoor environmental quality: Padua Hospital case study

This paper presents the results of a field monitoring study of three medical wards at Padua General Hospital (Orthopaedics, Internal Medicine and Paediatrics), based on measurements of indoor conditions and on a survey of patient and medical staff perceptions. Microclimatic conditions were measured over an extended period using data loggers with a time step of 5 min. Maximum in-patient room temperatures exceeded 29 °C while mean values were around 26–27 °C. Generally, microclimatic conditions differed between in-patient and staff rooms. Spot and long-term monitoring was used to calculate PMV profiles which were compared to thermal comfort showing non uniform correspondence among wards and their occupants. Innovative statistical nonparametric methods were applied to analyse the survey, comparing the wards from both patient and staff points of view. Staff complained mostly about lack of privacy, room size, amount of common areas, poor air quality and acoustic discomfort, with significant differences between wards in relation to levels of satisfaction with building-related aspects. Patients, on the other hand, were more satisfied with both building-related aspects and indoor conditions than medical staff. Such a global assessment could easily be used, for example, to rank the necessity or the priority of changes or improvements to buildings as well as determine the most important features, both individually and globally, to be taken into consideration.