Determining the Needs of use and Design Principles of Open Spaces in Urban Hospitals

Hospitals offer mainly treatment services to people as their basic functions. The qualifications and quantities of doctors working in the hospitals as well as the service quality, accessibility to the technological innovations and providing comfortable places are therefore the essential issues taken primarily into consideration in the hospitals. However, even though open spaces in the hospitals occupy a significant place for both physical and emotional health of patients and their relatives, they are not adequately given a significant place in the prior subjects of treatment processes. Issue of the service quality provided in the health campuses, which have intensive users / patient groups, has come into prominence along with the issue of spatial qualities. In this sense, within the scope of this study, open spaces of Gazi University Hospital, in which a partial transformation process has been undergoing, including the construction of additional buildings and the demolition of old buildings, are selected as a case with the aim of discussing how they can be designed in a proper and efficient manner to meet the demands and to satisfy the expectations of the users. In this study, questionnaires are conducted to the main user groups in the hospital (academic and working staff, patients and their relatives, and students) in order to put forward the factors that could be crucial in creating new open spaces by determining and considering the essential needs and expectations of each and every group. Given the findings, it is determined that, despite their differences in durations and time spent, each user group uses the open spaces in the hospital for similar reasons including resting, eating and drinking, and distancing themselves from the usual hospital conditions by communing with the nature