Design in Mental Health 2016 Keynotes
Awards 2015 Grand Prix, Best Mental Health Building, and Best External Environment Awards, in the same year. Following Tom Cahill’s presentation, a number of questions were raised by the conference audience. Wendy de Silva – who was the lead architect on Kingfisher Court – asked Tom Cahill about post-occupancy evaluation, and in particular how the HPFT collected data both prior to, and after, the changes it had made – both environmental, and ‘staff training-wise’. Tom Cahill said: “We have quite a bit of both formal and informal data from service-user surveys, our incidents, and complaint information relating to different environments there previously, that we are using to compare what is happening now. The interesting thing will be to compare Kingfisher Court with previous environments over a period of time. We knew we had a big impact when we moved in there, but is it sustainable, and can it be benchmarked? What we will need to determine is whether we are really making a difference to our service-users and our staff.”
A CENTRAL REPOSITORY Wendy de Silva felt architects, in particular, would really benefit from a central repository of pre- and post-occupancy evaluation data on, for example, an adult inpatient mental healthcare unit; otherwise they were effectively ‘working blind’. “Currently,” she said, “all we may have as architects is data for perhaps the 1-2 years immediately following a new building’s completion. We really could do with something
‘We were moving people out of buildings that were not fit-for-purpose, and should have been closed years ago, into brand new buildings, and yet ratings in the survey went down’
more than just CQC inspections. Now that NHS Trusts are prepared to be more transparent, it would be really helpful to have the information which is collected anyway available more widely.”
Answering a question from a mental health nurse and academic, who asked if the Trust had formally evaluated the results of its recent ‘transformation programme’ with academic partners, Tom Cahill explained that the Trust had already worked closely with the University of Hertfordshire in evaluating the whole transformation programme, for instance in looking at the degree to which service-user access had improved. He said: “We thus have some of the bigger metrics, but what we haven’t yet got is the more detailed stuff that Wendy was talking about.”
MEDICAL PERSONNEL ‘FULLY BEHIND IT’ The speaker stressed that one of the reasons for the programme’s success to date was that the Trust’s ‘medical fraternity’ had been “behind the transformation ‘from the word go’.” He said:
Great emphasis was placed on provision of outside spaces at Kingfisher Court, built on the site of the former Harperbury Hospital.
“We had a medical staff committee, and clinical and managing directors, all in the thick of it from Day One. In fact, when things got shaky, and patients were starting to get nervous, it was our consultants that came to the fore. Because they were on a journey with us, things were a little easier, although I am still getting some people unhappy, and we may have to take a step or two back on some of the things we have done, which is something I would encourage anyone undertaking a transformation programme of this kind to do. If our medical leaders hadn’t been involved we would have struggled. When staff were moving wards and community teams we did look to our senior staff, including both our nurses and consultants, to keep a really tight grip on things.”
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THE NETWORK
OCTOBER 2016 13
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