Jane Ho, partner and regional practice director, health at HKS, calls for learning from the details of large-scale acute hospitals, both private and public, to transform healthcare facilities in the UK’s rural and other underserved areas as part of the new Neighbourhood Health Centres initiative.
Across the UK, the NHS is struggling with budget constraints, ageing infrastructure, and maintenance backlogs, compounded by rising patient demand and staff shortages. This situation is fraught with peril — particularly in underserved and rural areas. How can we, as architects, help keep the NHS not only functioning but thriving in such locations? The answer lies in a deep understanding of what can be standardised and how best to work with stakeholders to reduce costs and time, ensuring high-quality designs delivered on time to those in need.
These new facilities must be conceived as hubs that include primary care, midwifery, mental health, diagnostics, rehab, and elderly step-down services to reduce pressure on hospitals. With such varied demands, architects should design them as standardised, template-based designs scaled and adapted to local needs. They should be presented as networked, tiered facilities that relieve acute hospitals, streamline patient pathways, and enable preventive care.
NHS' Project Wings is gearing up to develop new private finance models gleaning insights from public-private models from a Public Private Partnership (PPP) and NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust programme (LIFT) to execute vibrant community hub projects with primary care, remote monitoring, future-ready telehealth services, midwifery, district nursing, mental health, addiction support, light diagnostics, rehab, and perhaps even elderly step-down care and social care.
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