Children’s Medical Care: Building Boom and Specialization

Children’s healthcare facilities over the past decade have experienced significant expansion that will continue to grow. According to research by Executives at Children's Hospital in Boston two years ago that considered population trends, market share, and the incidence of childhood diseases, the number of children with diabetes, obesity, and asthma is expected to climb significantly. It is also predicted that doctors will refer children with complex problems to large regional specialized medical centers on a more frequent basis.

In response to overcrowded facilities, there has been a recent boom in expansion to create more facilities and increasingly specialized centers catering to patients younger than 18.

Designers and architects of these facilities need to accommodate more equipment, plan for higher levels of power usage, and include space for future transitions and expansions as new technologies become available. Doctors are treating more children with serious illnesses such as cancers, leukemia and birth defects (such as hypoplastic left heart syndrome). Children fighting these diseases require intensified hospital services such as multiple hospital stays and overnights, sophisticated equipment, and extensive amounts of outpatient visits. In addition, the design for Environments for Healing for children needs to provide a warm, soothing interior environment that helps to minimize the typical stress and anxiety that young patients may experience. A related issue that is highly important for this type of project is an understanding of distinct identity and wayfinding cues as they pertain to pediatric facilities—whether in freestanding Children’s hospitals or housed within an existing acute care hospital setting.

RBSD’s extensive healthcare facility portfolio includes numerous pediatric facility designs, such as the Warner Communications Child Life Center at New York Hospital and the new “Children’s Hospital within a Hospital” at the new Jersey City Medical Center, which opened in May, 2004. Internationally, the firm has also designed two complete new 300-bed pediatric hospitals as part of medical city complexes in the Middle East.

Projects such as these create family-oriented environments in which parents can spend as much time as possible with their children. Accordingly, creating pediatric departments that offer day beds for parents is an important consideration that can greatly improve the comfort of the patients and their families. It is also important to try to create distractions for the children to help them take their minds off their illnesses. This type of distraction can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from whimsical artwork and interior architecture, such as the jungle theme RBSD created within the new Pediatrics Emergency Wing at The Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, to educational and entertaining interactive videos and displays such as the multi-channel video monitors included in RBSD’s design for the Samuel D. Harris Infant Dental Education Center at New York University. 

As a result of the recent boom in Children’s healthcare facilities, hospitals will intensify their regional and national marketing to parents and referring doctors as they try to attract more patients to their highly specialized new facilities. In addition, hospitals are branching out into new patient markets that feature new specialized techniques such as fetal surgery, diabetic care, and cancer care.