Abstract:

This paper reviews the development, structure and process of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) as an environment-behaviour approach to assessing built environments of all sizes and types. It illustrates the use of POEs with 3 examples from the Health Care sector: The Canadian Hospital Evaluation Program, the Weiss Institute, and 18 independent-living apartment units. A comparison is made between POEs and the approach currently used by occupational therapists (OT) for environmental assessments. Recommendations suggest that OTs approach could be extended and strengthened through 1) incorporating POE methods and existing data from environment behaviour studies 2) the use of standard assessment procedures and well-validated measures and 3) the development of a data bank on OT environmental assessments.