ESTATE REDEVELOPMENT


and the buildings should provide a positive signal about the importance of our users and their place in the community. “This will require a design team to work with the Trust that is unencumbered by the more regressive aspects of traditional NHS mental health facility design. While the buildings must of course be safe, and some of them secure, their primary purpose is to provide a place for mental healing. This means placing an emphasis on the provision of high quality gardens, freely accessible to service-users, with views and vistas that provide a sense of freedom. It means emphasising the importance of high quality finishes, fittings, and furniture, all of which require a great deal of thought, and need to be an integral part of the whole composition. Finally, it means placing a renewed emphasis on sustainability, creating buildings with systems that allow the users to minimise energy consumption while remaining safe and comfortable throughout the year.


“UK mental health design has been influenced over the years by highly prescriptive central guidance, some of which has constrained designers, and led to the creation of buildings which retain many of the features of the institutions that the Trust wants to replace. The challenge that the Trust will lay down to its appointed design team is to create buildings in which users feel comfortable and valued as well as safe.”


A remarkable brief


To our reading this remains one of the most remarkable briefs ever written in the Official Journal. We subsequently found out it was the work of Andrew Simpson, a planner and mental health professional who was the first leader of the Springfield Estate Modernisation Programme (EMP), working with Robert Barr, the Trust’s Estates director, and Kim Goddard, the director of Nursing. For those not accustomed to scanning the notices in the Official Journal, most procurement notices, while ostensibly about finding a team that will deliver innovation, value for money, and design excellence, are essentially concerned with minimising risk. There can be a great deal of discussion about what constitutes good value or good design, but no one wants to be held responsible for appointing design consultants that are not up to the job. Mention is often made of delivering innovation, but the key marks are usually given for experience; if your practice hasn’t designed and delivered three similar projects over the past five years, you need not apply, as there is virtually no chance of landing the job.


We sensed a rare opportunity to connect with an NHS client that was looking for a fresh approach, unsatisfied with the status quo, and willing to take the risks that invariably come with seeking something other (better) than standard outcome. We were also grateful for a client that valued a design-led approach, with the architect being asked to select M&E and


16


LIGATURE MAPPING


000Incidents/20 beds/year Ligature


Forensic Female Ward Forensic Male Ward 12


1


Acute Ward 19


Elderly People’s Ward 0


Eating Disorder Ward 2


Intensive Care Unit 3


Adolescent Centre 56


Rehabilitation 1


Figure 1: Mental health risk data – mapping of ligature incidents by type of ward location (based on anonymised incident data of over 20,000 incidents in England from 2007 to 2011).


cost consultants to work alongside them from the start, with a commitment to novate the design team into the contractor’s team at construction stage.


Over a year of submissions and site visits


What followed was a three-stage, RIBA- sponsored design competition which ran to more than a year of submissions, presentations, and site visits. When we received the news of our success in July 2012, we embarked on the project with an overwhelming sense of responsibility to our NHS client, and felt this was a remarkable opportunity for our architectural practice to use its skills in the service of our community, for the greater good. From the outset of this project, our work


VIOLENCE MAPPING


has had two main components. The first was to research and learn everything we could about the world of mental health design in order to deliver facilities that make users feel ‘comfortable, valued, and safe’. The second was to design new mental health facilities within the parameters of the approved masterplan – which necessitated multi-storey, multi-use structures in the centre of a new, residential mid-rise neighbourhood.


A running start


We familiarised ourselves with the Department of Health guidance, HBNs, HTMs, and other references for mental healthcare design. For obvious reasons, a great deal of this design guidance is devoted to risks, and specifically the


Elderly People’s Ward 30


000Incidents/20 beds/year Violence


Forensic Female Ward Forensic Male Ward 146


62


Acute Ward 169


Eating Disorder Ward 44


Intensive Care Unit 239


Adolescent Centre 201


Rehabilitation 146


Figure 2: Mental health risk data – mapping of incidents of violence by type of ward location (based on anonymised incident data of over 20,000 incidents on wards in England from 2007 to 2011).


OCTOBER 2020 | THE NETWORK


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