Designing buildings that promote health

For decades, the value of healthcare construction was measured at handover: on time, on budget, and to specification. Yet the real world now tells us something very different. Many of the illnesses filling hospital beds originate years earlier in the places people live, work, and grow up. With the NHS under unprecedented pressure — including over 2.8 million working-age adults now economically inactive due to ill health — healthcare construction has reached an inflection point: should buildings simply receive illness, or actively help prevent it?

This decline in population health is driving demand for NHS services, shrinking the workforce available to staff them, and weakening the national economy. Prevention cannot be delivered by the NHS alone; it depends on all public investment strengthening the social determinants of health (SDOH). Construction, which shapes the environments in which people live and work, faces similar workforce pressures to healthcare and has significant power to improve population health by shifting focus from treatment to prevention.

Health enables people to work, learn, and contribute to the economy, and a national rise in economic inactivity is a preventable one. And this is precisely where construction's social value commitments can be transformative. In construction, social value refers to the wider benefits a project delivers for local people — such as employment, skills, education, support for local businesses, and community wellbeing — during delivery and beyond. But social value is not a tick box exercise — it is a framework through which the industry can actively counteract the drivers of ill health, inequalities, and economic inactivity.