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Social spaces for young children in hospital
1School of Nursing and Human Sciences, Faculty of Science and Health, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland.
Insights
Young children desire accessible leisure facilities in hospitals to enhance their psychosocial well-being and social connection. Integrating these spaces and technology is key to a positive hospital experience for pediatric patients.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric healthcare design
- Child psychology
- Environmental psychology
Background:
- Hospital policies often overlook children's psychosocial needs, being designed around adult assumptions.
- Understanding child-friendly hospital environments requires incorporating young children's perspectives.
- This study addresses the gap in knowledge regarding children's views on hospital social spaces.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate young children's perspectives on hospital social spaces.
- To inform the design of a new children's hospital's built environment.
- To enhance the psychosocial well-being of children in hospital settings.
Main Methods:
- Employed an exploratory qualitative participatory design.
- Utilized semi-structured interviews and art-based activities for engagement.
- Recruited 55 children aged 5–8 years from various hospital departments.
Main Results:
- Children desire diverse, accessible leisure and entertainment facilities integrated throughout the hospital.
- These facilities combat boredom, enhance control, and reduce isolation through socialization.
- Technology can extend children's social connections to the outside world.
Conclusions:
- Technology offers potential for supporting psychosocial well-being in healthcare settings.
- Further research is needed on the ethics, facilitation, and impact of technology implementation.
- Designing child-friendly hospital environments requires considering children's unique needs and perspectives.
Background:
In the last number of years heightened interest has been attributed to the impact of hospital environments on children's psychosocial well-being. With policy largely built around adult assumptions, knowledge about what constitutes a child-friendly hospital environment from young children's perspectives has been lacking. If hospital environments are to aspire to being child friendly then the views of younger aged children must be taken into account. The current study investigated young children's perspectives of hospital social spaces to inform the design of the built environment of a new children's hospital.
Methods:
An exploratory qualitative participatory design was employed. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews (one-to-one and group workshops) which incorporated art-based activities to actively engage young children. Fifty-five young children aged 5 to 8 years with various acute and chronic illnesses were recruited from inpatient, outpatient and emergency departments of three children's hospitals.
Results:
Young children want a diversity of readily available, independently accessible, age, gender and developmentally appropriate leisure and entertainment facilities seamlessly integrated throughout the hospital environment. Such activities were invaluable for creating a positive hospital experience for children by combating boredom, enriching choice and control and reducing a sense of isolation through enhanced socialization. When in hospital, young children want to feel socially connected to the internal hospital community as well as to the outside world. Technology can assist to broaden the spectrum of children's social connectivity when in hospital - to home, school and the wider outside world.
Conclusion:
While technology offers many opportunities to support children's psychosocial well-being when in confined healthcare spaces, the implementation and operation of such services and systems require much further research in the areas of ethics, facilitation, organizational impact and evaluation.
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