Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the beliefs of patients and healthcare professionals in Saudi Arabian settings about the role of family visiting, presence and their impact on the patient wards layout and patient room spatial design. Cross-sectional study of 225 surveys completed during January 2019 and January 2020 at three hospitals in Dammam Metropolitan Area to evaluate the impact of family presence at three types of wards; male, female (medical & surgical) and female (obstetrics and genecology) on healthcare outcomes including patients' outcomes of pain, sleep, depression, anxiety, length of stay, noise, overall satisfaction and safety of patients' falls and healthcare professionals' outcomes of medical efficiency, reducing medical errors, safety and satisfaction. The study investigates healthcare professionals' beliefs about the position of the family zone in the patient room. The data were collected and statistically analysed with R version 4. All participants agreed on the importance of family presence in improving the healthcare outcomes. The results showed differences in the beliefs of the healthcare professionals and patients in issues related to visiting policies (number of visiting hours, number of visitors, and visit restriction). 38 % of healthcare professionals believe that family zone should be bedside and adjacent to the window side. (c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).