Cite this article
Tibesigwa, B. M., Karumuna, B. V. (2025) ‘Maternal health and well-being: Behavioural perspective of architectural garden features for sustainable antenatal and postnatal care in Tanzania’, Architecture Papers of the Faculty of Architecture and Design STU, 30(1), pp. 28-43. https://www.doi.org/10.2478/alfa-2025-0004
SUMMARY
Garden features are essential for improving maternal health and well-being. Nevertheless, the maternal mortality rate in Tanzania has been declining over the latest years due to government efforts and international development aid organisations’ support. Several studies have suggested designing features that offer positive feelings to encourage awareness, arouse senses, and stimulate curiosity for different user groups in hospital settings. They have underscored that when tangible garden features, such as plant materials, water features, and playgrounds, are accommodated in the design, they provide environmental indications for different user groups to assess the compatibility concerning their determinations and what nature can provide.
This study has investigated garden features with healing effects to assess users’ behavioural perspectives in determining the capacity of garden features for sustainable antenatal and postnatal care. It adopted a questionnaire tool and an interview as a survey method to collect and examine the behavioural perspective of hospital garden features that mainly targeted the caregivers and hospital visitors of a large population based on a small collected sample of respondents within the case study area. The data was computed and analysed – collected from the Meta Maternal Department (MMD) of Mbeya Zonal Referral Hospital (MZRH) in Mbeya, Tanzania. The quantitative approach involving a survey questionnaire, multiple regression analysis, and SPSS 25-AMOS were adopted to analyse the data and generate the structural equation model which addresses sustainable maternal health (MH) factors in antenatal and postnatal care (A&PNC). Moreover, the study computed the reliability estimate associated with the composite scores for the eleven observed variables or items using the standardised Cronbach’s formula.
Findings underscored the three most significant indicators found to be related to garden features (βGF = 0.227, p = 0.000), behavioural perspective of mothers (βBP = 0.067, p = 0.001), antenatal and post-natal care (βA&PNC = 0.246, p = 0.002), and social affair factors (βSA = 0.092, p = 0.003) with an explanatory power of 55.7% (R2 = 0.557). On the other hand, the multiple regression findings show that three predictors have achieved a reasonably good performance of 55.70% (R2 = 0.557), clarifying a substantial relationship between explained variables. The obtained results indicate that all three constructs of the recognised strategies (garden features, social affairs, and behavioural perspective) bear a positive statistically significant role in reducing challenges related to depression and anxiety to attain maternal health.
This study has addressed the outdoor healing environment in MMD of MZRH that determines the benchmarking of design guidelines for researchers and designers during the design of maternal hospitals. However, the findings and recommendations call upon outdoor healing environment designers’ commitment to include all necessary healing garden design features that accelerate the healing process. Finally, the study draws an opportunity for caregivers and decision-makers to apply and integrate garden users’ requirements during the healing garden design to reduce postpartum depression and anxiety challenges.