SUMMARY
In the past few decades, architectural solutions to hospital facilities in Slovakia have not been able to satisfactorily meet the needs of both the patients and the personnel. In the field of neonatal health care, the crucial factor is the response to the growing number of pre-term infants. In the last decade, the number of pre-term babies in Slovakia has grown by 30%. In many cases, stressful stimuli from the intensive care units (such as noise, light, pain, insensitive manipulation and separation from the mothers) may cause damage to many important brain structures, which may lead to cognitive and emotional disorders of the premature infants in the future. Early parental intervention strategies along with behavioural nursing practices applied from the start of the stay of the premature babies in the intensive care units have helped to improve their long-term prognosis. To improve the prognosis of premature babies not only from the short term perspective, but also in terms of long-term results, modern architectural tools need to be used in the design and reconstruction of neonatal departments. Family-Centred Care (FCC) is such a unique architectural tool for the transformation of hospital departments supporting social inclusion. The trend of improving the conditions for patient treatment motivates architects designing hospital departments to create such internal hospital environment for new-born babies that allows for the inclusion of parents into the treatment process. In addition to the social and healthrelated effects, the inclusion of parents in the child‘s treatment process also has an economic benefit for healthcare facilities. Despite the initial higher investment costs, the resulting shortened hospitalization of patients saves them money. When implementing the method in our conditions, due to the insufficient legislative, material and personnel preparedness of healthcare facilities, it is necessary to “borrow”, at least in some areas, procedures from abroad.