Inpatient Environments


those intended to be beautiful, to cheaper and less aesthetically pleasing. As a result, when the hospital opened, many people hated it. “To give you a flavour – it was dark, with low ceilings, and the reception was a glass box – because the receptionist, rather than those who would be using it, had been allowed to design it. Instead of being an open, welcoming, and reassuring place, it felt like going into a prison. There were hard tiles on the floor, and I agree with what the previous speaker, John Short, said about being careful with high ceilings, although it is possible to make such rooms comfortable and not too noisy. You can, however, make rooms with low ceilings very, very noisy. If you put down the hardest and darkest floor tiles you can find, you can make it look pretty miserable as well.”


‘LOTS OF DEAD SPACES’ There were also, the speaker explained, ‘many dead spaces; areas you couldn’t use’. “For some reason,” she added, “there was also prolific use of the sort of wall tiles my parents had in their kitchen in the 1970s.”


One of the things the architect did not cut


back on, Lisa Rodrigues remarked, was a courtyard with a koi carp pond six feet deep in places, which couldn’t generally be used, ‘given


‘We also need alternatives to hospital admission for people who do get into crisis’


‘A good hospital/good clinic plus good staff equals great services’


that the patients were, by definition of needing to be in hospital, very poorly’. “That courtyard has had to remain locked since the day the facility opened,” she told delegates. “It gets unlocked so that people can see to the fish, which many people love, but the space could have been so much better designed. “Another design flaw was that, instead of having a dining room on each ward, the designers thought it would be wonderful to have a café useable by the local community; theoretically great, but there then wasn’t anywhere for people to eat on the wards. Patients in a mental hospital are extremely unwell, and to get them to go downstairs, often in their dressing gowns, to get their food, was impractical and undignified. You would thus see a queue of nurses carrying trays back to the wards, and the patients would then eat their meals in isolation in their bedrooms. What were the designers thinking? Given how important mealtimes are in any hospital, I cannot imagine. Everybody said: ‘I told you so; that it wouldn’t work’.


LESSONS LEARNED


“Much has now changed. Phase 2 was built in 1999 with a completely different approach, and was really successful, and a considerable sum of money and thought has been afforded to


upgrading and refurbishing Phase 1. With hindsight, however, I believe this was an object lesson in how not to do things.” Lisa Rodrigues’ next focus was one of the facilities she had had responsibility for opening – Chalkhill in Haywards Health, West Sussex, a 16-bed young people’s mental health unit opened in 2010. She said: “I had to have considerable belief then, because the commissioners told me categorically we didn’t need any beds for children and young people, arguing that such patients simply do not need to come into a hospital if community services would only meet their needs.”


On the same subject, the speaker said she had recently been invited to comment on a yet- to-be-screened Channel 4 Dispatches television programme called A Bed Too Far, which tells of the impact on young people and their families of having to travel hundreds of miles when they need to be in hospitals due to a national shortage of beds. She said: “With Chalkhill, the staff didn’t believe we would get the money or the land to build the hospital, and the commissioners were convinced it wasn’t needed. We went ahead and did it, and it proved very important. At least there are 16 beds in Sussex where young people can be admitted and treated when they are very unwell.”


DIFFERENCE OF OPINION One of the facilities that Lisa Rodrigues said she was most proud of was the Selden Centre at Swandean, Worthing, for people with learning disabilities. She told the audience: “Our commissioners said at one point that service-


THE NETWORK


J u l y 201 5


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