Wood as Material Suitable for Health Care and Therapeutic Facilities

Abstract

Paper deals with features important for creating healthy microclimate in health care and therapeutic facilities. It presents basic facts about visual, tactile, behavioural, somatic, acoustic and socio-cultural comfort particularly important for spatial design of these facilities.It focuses especially on choice of materials and their surfaces for built-in elements and furnishings which plays crucial role for well-being - comfort. It sets hypotheses that using wood as phenomena by humanisation of microenvironment, it is possible to reach high level of complex comfort.It also shows main disadvantages of using wood in the healthcare and wellness facilities, where belongs particularly more demanding maintenance to keep the surfaces clean and disinfected and water resistant. To prevent these problems, the high resistant chemical /artificial finishing is needed. But with chemical finishing there are lost many positive effects of wood on healthy microclimate.Despite of it there are two hypotheses that are contributing to the statements that wood is suitable for the healthcare facilities. First is that natural wood without additional chemical finishing has antibacterial (antimicrobial) effect. And second is that it is possible to provide a surface modification with the aim to reach the state that wood can be hydrophobic or even superhydrophobic and thus easy to maintain such as adjustment by plasma or by finings based on nanotechnologies and biomimetic. The paper presents examples and own tests supporting these hypotheses.