HOSPITAL DESIGN
Putting good design more ‘centre stage’
With Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, having announced in early October last year that 40 new hospitals would be built across England by 2030 as part of a ‘package’ worth £3.7 billion, Christopher Shaw, a senior director at one of the UK ’s leading healthcare architectural practices, Medical Architecture, asked – in a webinar address given as part of IHEEM’s Digital Week 2020 – how the sector could ensure that good design quality was a key feature of more new hospitals in the future. The Architects for Health chair said that key steps to achieving this should include drawing on other sectors and international expertise, looking for design teams from a wider pool, investing in a more efficient stakeholder process, and simply ‘being more ambitious’. HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Christopher Shaw’s thought-provoking presentation, sponsored by Architects for Health, and titled ‘Helping HIP: How do we ensure design quality in the new Health Infrastructure Plan?’, began with Paul Yeomans, a director and colleague at Medical Architecture, introducing him to attendees. The speaker explained that his main focus in the webinar would be how the sector could ensure good design quality was embedded in the both the new hospitals planned under the Department of Health & Social Care’s Healthcare Infrastructure Plan (HIP), and other new healthcare facilities built in the short-to-medium-term future. He said: “We are all hoping that this major investment programme delivers some great health infrastructure, but there are some significant challenges with this quite accelerated programme, speed of delivery chief among them, especially given the very varied range of projects planned – from tertiary hospitals, to
smaller community facilities, and a wide range of planning assumptions behind each one.” The ‘challenge for design’ was thus how to achieve planning consistency. He added: “Another challenge to HIP will be the availability both of resource within the NHS to model the clinical planning assumptions, and of the necessary design and planning skills in the UK.”
Very little infrastructure developed All this, he noted, came against a backdrop where, for the past 10-15 years, the UK had been through a process of developing very little health infrastructure, resulting in limited resources – both from the design and consultant side, but also in the construction sector. Christopher Shaw added: “Equally, the supply chain feeds into the ability to plan and design good infrastructure, and it may need to approach supply differently in future to ensure sufficient availability of components to get new buildings built
on time.” Christopher Shaw was pleased, however, to note that some of the key healthcare infrastructure projects were ‘advancing reasonably fast’; he cited the North Manchester General Hospital HIP ‘transformation’ HIP project, although others were at a considerably earlier stage, with significant work to do both to ‘hit their various programme milestones’, and to maintain good design quality throughout; the latter goal would require ‘custodianship and nurturing’. Moving to the crux of his presentation, Christopher Shaw told the audience that ‘Design quality matters’, although he acknowledged this was something he shouldn’t need to point out. He said: “Everybody listening today should understand that design quality isn’t the ‘wow factor’ or the ‘pixie dust’ that is sprinkled over a project at a later date. It’s fundamental to the whole process of planning, design, realisation, monitoring, and ongoing management of the
The Centre for Addiction & Mental Health, Phase 1D, in Toronto, Ontario (Stage 2 design).
The masterplan for the Northern Beaches Hospital in New South Wales, Australia.
March 2021 Health Estate Journal 19
©Medical Architecture
©Medical Architecture
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