David Green, AIA, principal at the London offices of Perkins+Will, and Basak Alkan, AICP, LEED AP / healthcare district planner, at the architect, interior, and urban design company’s Atlanta, US base, examine growing moves in the US to re-evaluate planning policies to ensure that local environments are built that promote healthy activities, with the creation of so-called ‘Health Districts’.
Equally, they explain, healthcare ‘systems’ are starting to see the value in using their campuses to promote this process. In the UK, they argue, ‘the timing is perfect for the re-evaluation of the relationship between the medical campus and the city’.
To varying degrees the global healthcare industry in developed nations is undergoing significant transformations to address the challenges brought on by a number of circumstances, including demographic, economic, and regulatory changes. These circumstances vary by country and region, but there are some basic conditions that span all of these communities. In the UK in particular, there is a move to re-evaluate the relationship between the NHS medical campus and the cities and towns within which these campuses are located. This is a very similar situation to what is happening in the US, with a number of health systems re-integrating themselves back into their respective communities, physically, as well as programmatically.
In this article we will focus on some of the trends in the US, and how these might affect the future planning models for healthcare campuses, and, by extension, academic health science centres, in the UK.
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