Designing tomorrow’s high secure units

The new publication sets out the key principles and detailed guidance, from a building design standpoint, to ensure a safe, secure, and comfortable environment at each hospital that aids patient recovery and improves outcomes, and balances the need for high levels of security with the requirement to respect the privacy, health, dignity, wellbeing, and spiritual needs, of both patients and staff. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

Meeting me in one of the many units within the sizeable grounds of Rampton Hospital to discuss how the new High Secure Building Design Guide had evolved, Andy White, capital projects manager with Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, which operates the facility, and Ian Fidler, the hospital’s clinical security manager, began by explaining that work on the publication had begun in earnest in 2006. Andy White said: “That year marked a decade since the publication of the new guide’s forerunner, the “Physical Security Requirements” document, by the Special Hospitals Service Authority. It was felt that it was high time that the guidance in the earlier publication on the optimal design of mental healthcare buildings to balance patient, staff, and visitor security with patient wellbeing and comfort, was updated – to reflect not only changes in construction practice, technologies, and techniques, but equally the many new care pathways, therapies, and treatment approaches now available for mentally disordered patients. “In 2006 – when I was estates manager at Rampton Hospital – I had recently chaired a group putting together a set of new building design standards for the hospital. These drew on the lessons that the security, capital projects, and estates teams here had learned during the design and construction of a new 70-bed Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (or DSPD) Unit (“The Peaks”), and a new 50-bed Women’s Unit, which were completed in 2004 and 2007 respectively. The standards covered everything from key security considerations to risk management protocols, and from engineering standards to the recommended size and layout of patient rooms.

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