INPATIENT FACILITY DESIGN


CAMHS bedroom’s positive initial feedback


purpose-built office and production facility. A collaboration of industry partners including the company has meanwhile worked with the service-users, experts-by-experience, and architects, to lead the development of a new ‘co-production’ CAMHS bedroom. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, met up with head of Marketing, Mark Childs, to find out more.


Kingsway Group, the anti-ligature door system specialist, has had a particularly busy last two years, launching a number of significant new products, and moving to a considerably larger 32,000 ft2


I met with Mark Childs – who joined Kingsway Group two and half years ago, and is a passionate advocate of the impact of good design on mental health – in a well-appointed boardroom adjacent to the new CAMHS bedroom on the second floor of the company’s impressive Sidcup headquarters. The business’s 100+ staff moved to the new building, close to the M25, from their former base just a few miles south in early 2024, having outgrown the previous premises, and needing both additional production and storage space and larger offices to accommodate the various head office functions. Mark Childs had explained before


we met that he was particularly keen to discuss the development of the new Co-production CAMHS bedroom collaboration, and indeed the day before our meeting, Kingsway Group, along with the collaboration partners, had held the first of several planned open days at which a mix of experts-by-experience, manufacturers, architects, and NHS estates and facilities and clinical personnel, had the opportunity to view the new facility and give some initial feedback.


Kingsway Group, and all the other product manufacturers that have collaborated to get the CAMHS bedroom completed, have paid particular attention, in its design, to the views of users of such spaces, especially on features that tend to work well, and those that don’t. For example, as I saw when Mark Childs showed me around – having first explained the background to, and aims of, the project – one of the first things one notices on entering the bedroom is a semi-circular ‘refuge’ alcove at the opposite side of the room to the


bed. Here a service-user can retreat and feel ‘invisible’ from the door when they need space – a direct result of service-user feedback. A recurring theme throughout my visit was that the current bedroom is only a ‘first iteration’, and that all those involved want to see it further evolve and develop over time.


Proponents’ personal interest The CAMHS bedroom has been designed with the aim of improving such spaces across the mental healthcare sphere, and particularly to make them less institutional, more therapeutic, and as much of a ‘home from home’ as possible for the young users, while affording them a space where they will feel comfortable and safe, and have a sense of ‘ownership’. All three of the project’s instigators, Kingsway’s Mark Childs, Andrew Arnold, the managing director of architects, Gilling Dod, and Kevin Gorman – founder, chairman, and owner of fenestration specialist, Britplas, have a personal passion for improving CAMHS provision. Mark Childs and his wife, for instance, have two adopted children, who have had their own mental health struggles, having had ‘a very tough time’ prior to their adoption. He told me: “In the past two years


The new CAMHS bedroom, at Kingsway Group’s Sidcup HQ, is the result of collaboration between several manufacturers, with its development very much informed by service-user feedback on ‘what does and doesn’t work well’ in such settings. Inset: Head of Marketing, Mark Childs, joined Kingsway two and half years ago, and is a passionate advocate of the impact of good design on mental health.


THE NETWORK | NOVEMBER 2024


Andrew, Kevin, and I, and a small co- production team, which has contributed ideas throughout, have designed and built a ‘to-scale’ CAMHS bedroom here at our Sidcup HQ. The three of us, plus our global CEO at Kingsway, Julian Hall, and the team, have undertaken a genuine co-production. The bedroom’s development has seen us work closely with experts by experience at NHS Trusts, and particularly with young people from specialist children’s charity, Caudwell Children, whose Caudwell International Children’s Centre in Newcastle-under-Lyme is the UK’s first purpose-built centre for multidisciplinary therapy for childhood disability, as well as research into neurodevelopmental conditions including autism. “A couple of years ago,” Mark Childs continued, “Kevin, Andrew, Julian, and I


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