Children's right to health and hospital buildings under extraordinary conditions

Abstract

The hospital experience involves an environment where the daily routine is disrupted, the child feels pain and anxiety due to illness, is exposed to frightening medical procedures, and encounters strangers. When the child's different and sensitive structure from adults meets with the fear and anxiety of hospitalization, it is compulsory to develop unique design approaches for the child user in health structures.  When the disaster conditions experienced in our country are added, the importance of researching the issue specifically for children increases even more. Based on this point, the design approach that should be created for children in hospitals in ordinary and extraordinary situations has been investigated. For this purpose, a survey was conducted to determine the condition in daily life and a bibliometric analysis was performed to reveal the studies on hospitals and earthquakes in architecture. The survey was applied to 384 adults across Turkey. The data obtained were visualized with Maxqda and Vosviewer programs. As a result, the disasters and destruction have again shown that safety is hospitals' most basic design criterion. The multidimensional task undertaken by the aesthetic factor in the playground and mass-space scale in relieving the child's stress and anxiety has come to the fore in the study. To protect the right to life and facilitate the hospital process, it is necessary to create rich and compelling perception conditions, to provide states and security that will allow the child to experience the environment. 

Keywords: Rights, Hospital, Architecture, Child, Design