DESIGN IN MENTAL HEALTH 2022
Pictured, left, Kingfisher Court – a £42 m, acute mental health facility in Radlett. Right: Good garden spaces can positively impact recovery.
building. But actually,” the architect asked, showing a rendered image of a modern mental health facility’s s light and airy corridor, “how would Nick have felt being in a place more like this?” He interjected: “I would have skipped down to the room, and thought, ‘Brilliant; let’s get started with my therapy.’”
Confrontational space Cath Lake continued: “And can the difference in the quality of the space create a difference in how somebody might have engaged in therapy and felt from the very outset, rather than it being weeks before he could actually engage and move forward?” She said: “So, with the new hospital we have designed for Lynfield Mount, we are at RIBA Stage 2. We started at the very beginning of lockdown, and had to really think through how we could get good stakeholder feedback given the constraints we were all under. We have always been face-to-face people; like most architects, we generally want to get people in a room and discuss things, but clearly we couldn’t do that, so we held more than 30 workshops, and also used Mentimeter software (which is said to ‘help build interactive and engaging presentations’).” The workshops, the speaker explained,
started out being about the vision, i.e. ‘What are we trying to achieve?’, and included ‘a huge range of people’ – ‘quite an effort to manage on Microsoft Teams, and to actually capture what people were saying’. The sessions were repeated three times per day, with the feedback captured, and over 50 stakeholders taking part.
Groups for design development “Moving on from the ‘vision’, and ‘capturing the dream’,” Cath Lake added, “we broke it down into slightly smaller elements so that we could manage the design development – with groups for wards and therapies, the main building, and for PICU/crisis – which Nick was very much part of. We also had a group for staff spaces, but everybody had a view, with regular updates for all. We captured elements such as ‘How do we want the main public space to feel?’” Here Nick Smith said: “This Mentimeter
THE NETWORK | AUGUST 2022
An artist’s impression of the ‘Active Street’ at the new Lynfield Mount Hospital linking the entrance and wards.
interactive software blew my mind. You write what you want, and everybody else can see your words. Nobody changes what you say into clinical language, or an acronym. That is what I wrote, and that is on there – and other people have been writing the same thing. I had people agree with what I’ve said, and it was just a great experience being with lots of different types of staff, other professionals, and experts by experience.”
Benefits of the ‘Teams’ approach Cath Lake said: “We didn’t split it down into a kind of Stakeholder group, or a Patient group and Staff group and an OT group; everybody was involved, so
everybody’s voice was equal. I think the ‘Teams’ approach helps, because people that may not have initially felt they wanted to contribute were very happy to do so even more vocally on this platform. Very quickly,” she continued, “we ran through off-ward therapy spaces; for example, ‘How do we want places to feel?’ The importance of a positive impact on working environments was very important. We focused on really easy things to capture – for instance looking at journeys towards the place of safety, and how that was going to feel.” The workshops were ‘live’, and the
architects and designers thus ‘moved elements around’ to demonstrate that
Some of Nick Smith’s own art. Top left: ‘It’s Not All Bad’. “During a difficult flare-up or dark time,” he explains, “people will see the ‘Angry, don’t approach’ face. The shapes and colours bursting out of my head convey looking well, but hiding difficult thoughts, which most of us do.” Top right: ‘Come Together’. The artist says: “Whether you’re a man or woman, red or blue, brown or blonde, in love, or just friends – plus all the other opposites we have in life – I wanted to highlight the power of peer support and my own journey of companionship and love. This painting was for a drug and alcohol charity in Keighley who helped me with my own addiction.” Right: ‘Great Pink Shark’. The artist says: “I love sharks, but they get a bad press; they’re misunderstood and persecuted just like mental illness. Why should we have to present ourselves as bright and colourful to be accepted? I just want to fit in. Once you get to know us, you’ll realise we’re not scary.”
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Courtesy of David Churchill
Images used courtesy of Nick Smith
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