Hospitals as Places or Spaces: Consumed by Patients as Their Present Home

An interesting question one could ask themselves is, ‘Is a hospital a place or a space?’ Can a hospital really be called a home where someone feels a sense of belonging? I always felt that hospitals are more of a space rather than a place. No one is happy going to the hospital and can’t wait until they are able to leave. Interestingly Recent articles state that the new hospital being built in Brampton, also known as the William Osler Health Centre is known to be the 21st Century Home for their patients. The hospital is going to be designed in order to make the patients feel as if they are at home. The hospital consists of many new designs to make the environment feel more friendly and welcoming. The aim of the hospital is to make the patients feel at home and make them forget about their pain. Josie Parnis states that the childrens rooms are going to be decorated in ways in which the child will forget about their pain and illness and enjoy themselves. After reading this news article, I thought to myself that hospitals are more of a place rather than a space. A patient has to spend a couple of days, to a couple of months or years in a hospital. A patient gains a sense of belonging after being in the hospital for so long. With the new layout that this hospital plans to make, they are allowing the patients to feel at home. Performing activities such as sleeping, eating, and bathing in an area where you are comfortable makes all the difference in ones recovery. The main purpose of the hospital is to make the patients happy and allow them to feel that they are not in some random place because they have to be; rather the hospitals goal is to allow a patient to feel at home. The hospital becomes a meaningful place for the patient since they are able to connect to it and feel a sense of belonging and also a sense of privacy. A person feels privacy in their home, so by making the hospital feel more homey, a patient can feel the same sense of privacy they did at home. The hospital can be looked at as a university. It is an institution as a whole, with many sub rooms within it which all have different functions. The hospital is a place with many different little spaces. After concluding that a hospital is a place rather than a space, I asked myself ‘how does a hospital consume space and place?’ To me it seems as if the hospital is consuming as little area as they can. The parking lot is a perfect example. Instead of having the parking on one floor, they have built a parking lot with many floors for cars to park. This consumes less space. The hospital is only consuming space in a place in order to help society.

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