Getting Personal

Couple more peices of work to point you to:

Personal Space, looking at interior design of mental health bedrooms

 

and a short article on active and productive art in healthcare settings.

Read more...

New Client Guides

A couple of new publications now up on the website:

Circulation in Multi-service Facilities : A quick reference guide to the implications of different organisational diagrams on the utility, amenity and cost of shared facilities. This publication helps client teams explore the benefits and implications of different models of facility where a number of different services are coming together.

Commissioning Healthcare Environments : quick reference guides for Project Board Members and for Stakeholders involved in briefing and agreeing the design of new and reconfigured facilities; developed to help clinicians, and others, who are inexperienced in commissioning building works to understand the process and how, through intelligent design, to get the most from it. These guides cover all the main stages including the business case, briefing, selecting your delivery team, and developing and agreeing the design, including links to additional information and help at each stage.

Read more...

Planning Cities : Public Assets

Getting the most out of healthcare development starts a long time before even the breifing stage - it starts at the point we set strategies for the development of our communities and decide where new homes might be and how they will be linked and served. Often new health facilities are criticised for being in the wrong place, but they can only be where there is land available close(ish) to the population they need to serve. Therefore how we plan community development directly impacts how effectively we can plan the healthcare estate needed to support that developing community.

We've been working at this interface, seeing how city planning and service planning can work better together.

We've just published a study linking the two together. Using Inverness as an example, this paper models the potential effect on the number and nature of healthcare facilities required to serve the changing City. The study looks at the changing strategies for healthcare provision, the potential infrastructure needed to support this and how that might map onto three ‘city scenarios’ considered during the City Visioning and Local Development Plan process, to help understand the impact on public sector service provision (and the public purse) of different development planning strategies.

Although the mapping shown here relates solely to healthcare facilities, similar effects might be anticipated in relation to other public service infrastructure.

Read more...

Relative Values

“....so which takes precedence, the momentary view of a historic monument from a road junction or the view from the window of a child’s hospital room?”

....apparently, for some, this is a difficult choice....

Read more...