A Whole New Way – Designing the New Cambridge Children’s Hospital

Synopsis

Cambridge Children’s Hospital (CCH) is the first children’s hospital in the UK to integrate physical and mental healthcare, bringing young people, their families, clinicians, and researchers into the same space to foster collaboration and innovation within the emerging Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC), the centre of Europe’s leading life sciences cluster.
The spatial organisation supports a new model of integration, where the hospital’s multiple departments are organised to share resources, create greater operational efficiency, and encourage collaboration to form a knowledge exchange between clinicians, and foster empathy between patients. This integration is most obvious at the ward levels, where mental and physical health units are co-located on each level to bring together patients of similar ages and establish correlations between mental and physical health conditions.
Clinically, this integration brings team members together to create an efficiency of space and service, consolidating hospital staff who are currently dispersed across several sites. More importantly, this provides opportunities to exchange novel insight and knowledge around the care of young people.

This new model is the first of its kind in the world and aims to treat the whole child, not just their underlying symptoms, by taking into account the mental health implications of long-term hospital stays and the physical health complications faced by patients with mental health conditions.
I will be joined by one of the clinical leads working on the CCH and our presentation will set out the following:
– The client’s vision for the CCH.
– How the design has responded to the client’s vision and brief.
– How the spatial organisation supports their model of integration and provides future flexibility.
– How we are designing with empathy and providing spaces that supports healing and responds to the needs of all involved: clinicians, parents, and children of all ages.