Abstract

This presentation observes that hospital design reflects the personality of both the development team and the client organisation. The team at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital has developed a number of new hospitals in the UK, developing a detail-driven approach to hospital design and supporting a vision for buildings to have the balance and personality of Vitruvian Man (striving for excellence in all aspects of form, function and structure).

Working at Alder Hey has revealed to the team two big characteristics of the organisation: there is a sense of informality and innovation that ripples throughout Alder Hey; and there is a very close bond between the teams that provide services and the children, families and communities they serve. Both of these traits appear to have spread to the heart of the design of the new hospital.

Innovation at Alder Hey includes:

• the overall concept, with the Park wrapping itself over and into the building;
• the construction of the building, which pushes the boundaries of off-site construction to reduce, by 20%, the normal construction period;
• the financing of the building, via use of pension funds;
• the development of a top-hung glazed wall with interstitial blind at the front of each patient bedroom (designed by aerospace engineers), which has revolutionised the ward design; and
• the joining-up of the building management system with the trust’s clinical systems to create the concept of a living building that can interact with patients and staff.

The snowball effect of innovation has led to the rapid development of the living building concept through the creation of an innovation hub, which is driving a new wave of technology innovation around the hospital.

These innovations include: personalised accounts for children, so that they can create characters online before arriving at hospital – these characters appear in bedrooms and treatment rooms; sensor development, including the concept of placing sensors on the skin to detect the contents of the blood – thereby avoiding the need to jab the patient; application of the latest cognitive computing to help personalise the approach to patients and predict outcomes; and smart theatres with 3D pre-operative planning, 3D printing, and streaming of images during operations.