Putting good design more ‘centre stage'

With Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, having announced in early October last year that 40 new hospitals would be built across England by 2030 as part of a ‘package’ worth £3.7 billion, Christopher Shaw, a senior director at one of the UK ’s leading healthcare architectural practices, Medical Architecture, asked – in a webinar address given as part of IHEEM’s Digital Week 2020 – how the sector could ensure that good design quality was a key feature of more new hospitals in the future. The Architects for Health chair said that key steps to achieving this should include drawing on other sectors and international expertise, looking for design teams from a wider pool, investing in a more efficient stakeholder process, and simply ‘being more ambitious’. HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Christopher Shaw’s thought-provoking presentation, sponsored by Architects for Health, and titled ‘Helping HIP: How do we ensure design quality in the new Health Infrastructure Plan?’, began with Paul Yeomans, a director and colleague at Medical Architecture, introducing him to attendees. The speaker explained that his main focus in the webinar would be how the sector could ensure good design quality was embedded in the both the new hospitals planned under the Department of Health & Social Care’s Healthcare Infrastructure Plan (HIP), and other new healthcare facilities built in the short-to-medium-term future. He said: “We are all hoping that this major investment programme delivers some great health infrastructure, but there are some significant challenges with this quite accelerated programme, speed of delivery chief among them, especially given the very varied range of projects planned – from tertiary hospitals, to smaller community facilities, and a wide range of planning assumptions behind each one.” The ‘challenge for design’ was thus how to achieve planning consistency. He added: “Another challenge to HIP will be the availability both of resource within the NHS to model the clinical planning assumptions, and of the necessary design and planning skills in the UK.”

Very little infrastructure developed