Description

Little attention is devoted to the space opposite a bed and all too often patients are left to look at a blank wall. Not so in the Children and Youth Clinic in Freiburg where seating and play areas have been created in the patient rooms. This seemingly self-evident solution is an ice-breaker when rooming-in and also an incentive for patients to get out of bed.

The new clinic for children and adolescents is situated in the grounds of Freiburg’s University Hospital and unites the paediatric facilities and institutes that were previously dispersed across different buildings. The placement and figure of the building allows the landscape to flow around the building and into the five green inner courtyards. New gardens and adventure zones will be created in the existing park to meet the different needs of children and young people.

The design of the patient rooms elevates patient well-being to its central principle, creating a safe and welcoming environment tailored to the specific requirements of the “parent-and-child patient”. This term reflects the importance of the family for the recovery of the young patients, and the concept therefore also considers the health of the parents. As such, the need for close personal interaction between the children and their parents influences the spatial design of the patient rooms.

The patient rooms have one or two beds and are clearly zoned into different areas. The seating area near the window creates space for sitting and communication while the permanent rooming-in area is designed as a niche in which the young patients can play together with relatives and visitors. In the two-bed rooms, this area extends across the entire wall opposite the beds so that the patients always have an interesting view from their beds.

Immediately behind the entrance door is a work area for nursing that picks up the diagonal of the bathroom wall and directs incoming people straight towards the patient as soon as they enter the room. The entrances to the rooms are offset in niches from the ward corridor, creating a small buffer zone and “address” for each room.

The colour scheme and materials as well as the choice of motifs take into account the wide age range of the patients from young children to young adults. A series of different images were developed that pick up and adapt motifs from the local Black Forest region, which are used to denote the different rooms.

Particular attention was given to ways in which patients can personalise their rooms to create a family-friendly environment and promote recovery. Various magnetic and writeable surfaces can be used by the patients to make the room their own. In addition, communal play areas in the wards encourage mobility and personal development and promote interaction between the patients, helping them to make new friends.

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Originally published in: Wolfgang Sunder, Julia Moellmann, Oliver Zeise, Lukas Adrian Jurk, The Patient Room, Birkhäuser, 2020.