WNPC Orlando Sensory and Quiet Room
The Sensory and Quiet Room at Doc Weston's PH follows the Baltimore model -- dim lighting, soft surfaces, weighted blankets, minimal stimulation, available to patients and staff at any time without request or explanation.
The Florida adaptation is thermal. At every other WNPC site, the sensory room is primarily a space for visual, auditory, and tactile decompression. At the Orlando site, it is also a thermal refuge. Florida's heat is itself a form of sensory overload for patients whose neurological conditions make temperature regulation difficult, and the sensory room at Doc Weston's PH is kept at the coolest temperature of any south-side space on campus. A patient who is in sensory overload from pain, from a clinical encounter, from the accumulated stress of being in a medical setting -- that patient is also, in Pine Hills, in sensory overload from heat. The room addresses all of it simultaneously. Cool, dark, quiet, weighted. The body stops fighting the environment and starts settling.