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.

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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.

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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....

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Making Space

Last week saw the annual congress of the Academy of Urbanism take place Scotland. There was a real sense that planning and urban design was changing from simply describing spatial patterns of streets and squares and buildings to understanding the life in a community and freeing up space to facilitate that life to grow and improve. The one fly in the ointment, particularly for a discipline that grew out of a health promotion agenda, was that the redevelopment of Scotland’s more deprived communities was not having the positive impact on health that was hoped. Although there is good understanding that communities structures need to support healthy lifestyles choices; there was little understanding that part of community life – the way people access public service – is changing.

Development planning is, in many areas, working on the basis of an outdated mode of service provision – one where the local health service is a GP practice, but you go to hospital for most anything else. With health services being more about managing long term conditions in the community; and the move to more services, and more co-ordinated services, being based in the community, the needs placed on the physical infrastructure of a neighbourhood in terms of buildings and connections change. Planning communities where small plots are scattered about for different service types limits the potential for joined up services. Providing only for the ‘walkable’ choice can make health services less accessible to the most poorly, for whom a 15 minute walk or the bus may not be realistic options, and also makes peripatetic services difficult. Combined, these could lead to public sector commissioners choosing edge of town sites where larger plots allow more services to come together, more room for parking and better road connections for out-reach and in-reach services. If development planning doesn’t catch up with service planning, and make spaces and places for well connected community services and assets, we’re in danger of the public sector being forced to repeat the ‘out-of-town’ move that retail made; with this we miss the opportunities that public sector investment could bring to improve the life, amenity and impression of our local community centres.

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