At Cygnet Hospital Kewstoke, service user engagement has not simply informed a redevelopment project, it has defined it.
Located in Weston-super-Mare, our 71-bed hospital provides emergency admissions, acute services, personality disorder pathways and high-support inpatient rehabilitation across five wards. In 2024, we identified an extraordinary opportunity, an eight-year disused, overgrown on-site farm that had once been a thriving resource. Rather than viewing it as redundant land, we recognised its potential as a therapeutic, community-facing, recovery-focused environment.
What followed was not a facilities upgrade. It was a co-produced transformation, shaped by service users and strengthened by the involvement of Cygnet’s staff and Experts by Experience (EbEs), individuals with lived experience of inpatient mental health services
At Cygnet Health Care, co-production is embedded across our organisation. Our service users and Experts by Experiences contribute to recruitment, training, service development and quality improvement, ensuring lived experience informs decision-making at every level. At Kewstoke, EbEs alongside the individuals in our care were consulted during the redevelopment planning stage to advise on how outdoor therapeutic environments can feel psychologically safe, empowering and recovery-oriented rather than institutional.
Over the past year, service users have worked alongside occupational therapy teams to clear, restore and reimagine the farm space. From day one, patients were actively involved in weeding, painting, planting and shaping how the farm would function. Participation has always been voluntary, ensuring engagement remains meaningful and person-centred.
The result is a vibrant farm and horticultural hub that now delivers structured occupational therapy sessions, informal wellbeing spaces, skill-building workshops and social connection opportunities. Patients plant seeds in the greenhouse, cultivate vegetables, harvest produce and participate in cooking sessions using ingredients they have grown themselves. The first harvest, including onions, lettuce and cauliflower, marked not just an agricultural milestone, but a therapeutic one.
This redevelopment exemplifies Cygnet’s Recovery Education ethos and our wider commitment to empowering individuals to develop skills that support discharge and independence. The farm project has reinforced the importance of providing purposeful activity that builds identity beyond diagnosis, something the farm achieves daily.
The project is also generating social impact. We are working with a local horticulturalist to ensure sustainability and knowledge-sharing, and we are progressing a partnership with Weston College to develop vocational and educational pathways. There are plans to donate produce to local food banks and expand volunteering opportunities to local residents, further integrating the hospital into its community.
In April, we will host a preliminary unveiling of the Yurt, a purpose-built therapeutic gathering space, where we will share our Farm Vision and partnership progress. Stakeholders from the community will be invite, together with staff, service users and carers, culminating in a community BBQ.
This is not simply environmental regeneration. It is recovery made visible. It demonstrates how thoughtful design, lived experience insight and authentic co-production can transform unused land into a thriving therapeutic ecosystem.
Cygnet Hospital Kewstoke should win because this project shows what happens when organisations truly listen, and build services alongside the people who use them.
