Author:

Keywords:

hospital design, children

Abstract:

For children a hospital stay can be a poignant experience. To understand how hospital environments could be designed that make hospitalization more pleasant for them, we investigated what child-friendly hospital architecture means from young patients’ perspective. We conducted observations on a children oncology ward, and interviews with young patients their parents, and professional caregivers. This uncovers highly personal experiences which add detail to insights available in literature . Findings indicate that for young patients, a child-friendly hospital environment supports continuing daily life, socially and spatially. The hospital environment can support this continuation by looking less sterile and making the hospital feeling present less explicitly; allowing to undertake 'normal' activities like at home, which differ across different age groups; allowing to make choices and having a feeling of control and privacy to preserve self-dependence; and offering a view on life outside the hospital in order to partake in it indirectly. This suggests that designing child-friendly hospital architecture is a matter, not so much of preferences for specific colours or themes, but of more complex design principles like flexibility and customizability.