Objective: Hospital staff have to face challenges when an autistic child needs the hospital care. Researches on better understanding of the special needs of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) helps us to reflect on hospital care and ways to improve them in order to meet up with the demands of the autistic children and their parents.

Method: Cross-sectional, quantitative, qualitative questionnaire-based study was performed in Hungary, January-March 2021. Parents (n=70) of children/youth with ASD (aged 1-21) who stayed more than 1 day in hospital were included. Self-designed online questionnaire was distributed among parents to reveal the parents’ view about the hospital care. Convenience-sampling method were used for data acquisition. Statistics were performed with IBM SPSS 24.0. Confidence interval was determined 95% (p≤0.05).

Results: The highest proportion of children were hospitalized in internal medicine department (37%). 48.5% of parents were satisfied with the hospital care. Parents were significantly not as satisfied with the care of regional hospitals as they were with hospitals in central Hungary (p=0.016). Factors were identified that are considered important by parents during the hospital care and are least fulfilled such as short waiting times (2.43) and qualified hospital staff (2.46). None of the children got special wristband which is used in abroad to indicate the child’s specific status and help the work of the staff. Parents (95.7%) would welcome a short questionnaire on arrival to the hospital, in which the aim is to gather knowledge about their child to promote proper hospital care.

Conclusions: Hospitals in Hungary should strive to improve care for children with ASD. Education of the nurses is a baseline factor. Furthermore, implementation of the internationally used ASD specific protocols must be a priority for hospitals to achieve a good care for autistic children.