Architectural Scale, Visual Communication, and Wayfinding Experience in Turkish City Hospitals

Announced bed capacity is often read as if it recorded how a city hospital is used on foot. The measured variables are that capacity and two author-adjudicated language shares in unsolicited public texts. This study tests whether announced beds rank with the hospital-level share of retrieved texts describing navigation-related difficulties or indoor walking and mobility burdens. It does not estimate a causal effect of hospital size on wayfinding performance, and it does not audit physical signage or trace routes. Across the 26 hospitals named on the ministry directory retrieved in July 2026, the complete Yandex corpus comprised 566 texts; 670 Şikayetvar complaints were kept separate and were not pooled. In that complete corpus, author-adjudicated labels marked 35 navigation-related texts and 27 walking-or-mobility texts. Primary tests used 15 hospitals with at least 15 eligible Yandex texts (486 texts; 32 navigation-related and 26 walking-or-mobility). Neither share was statistically supported after correction for the two primary tests (navigation-related: Spearman ρ = 0.512; permutation p = 0.0534; Holm-adjusted p = 0.1040; walking-or-mobility: ρ = 0.513; p = 0.0520; Holm-adjusted p = 0.1040). Removing Bilkent and Etlik weakened the walking association, through both leverage and reduced power at k = 13. OpenStreetMap building footprint ranked with announced beds (ρ = 0.876 on 14 hospitals) and, once beds were partialled out, was not independently associated with either share. The footprint is the horizontal union of mapped building polygons. It is not an estimate of foot traffic inside a multi-storey building. The longest mapped block axis runs from 205 m to 656 m, so the campuses are horizontally extended rather than towers. Visual wayfinding communication is an interpretive layer linking spatial organisation to reported navigation experience; the interior-architecture contribution is this directory-wide language test and a codebook for later audits, not a measured evaluation of spatial configurations or signage systems. The coefficients are not route lengths, signage scores or patient-level prevalences.