Patients' and Nurses' Experiences of All Single-Room Hospital Accommodation: A Scoping Review

To identify, examine, and map literature on the experiences of single-room hospital accommodation, exploring what is known about how single-room accommodation in hospitals is viewed by patients and nurses.

Worldwide, hospital design is changing to mainly single-room accommodation. However, there is little literature exploring patients' and nurses' experiences of single-room designs.

Scoping review following the Joanna Briggs Institute guidance on scoping reviews.

We conducted the search in medical databases for scientific and gray literature. The four authors independently used a data extraction tool to include sources from the searches. The sources were discussed during the process, and in case of a disagreement between two reviewers, the third and fourth reviewer would be invited to participate in the discussion until consensus was achieved.

We included 22 sources published during the period 2002-2020, with a majority (n = 16) during the period 2013-2020. The sources were distributed on 10 different countries; however, England dominated with 14 publications. We found three main maps for reporting on patients' experiences: (1) personal control, (2) dignity, and (3) by myself. For the nurses' experiences, we found four main maps: (1) the working environment, (2) changes of nursing practice, (3) privacy and dignity, and (4) patient safety.

We suggested that patients' and nurses' experiences are predominantly interdependent and that the implications of single-room accommodation is a large and complex issue which goes beyond hospital design.