CAMHS – Stockport

Nominee Information

FWP have created and an inspiring new home for CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) in the centre of Stockport including 18 themed therapy rooms, exciting reception far detached from the typical CAMHS or hospital environment, open plan office areas to enable  collaborative working and meeting spaces that accommodate for the current and future ways of working and consultations. This amazing new facility for CAMHS will help children on their journey to recovery and support from numerous mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, self harm, ADHD, ASD, plus others. The team at the new centre include adolescent psychiatrists, mental health practitioners, clinical phycologists, child psychotherapists together with all the supporting admin teams for the services on offer.

Sited in Stockport Council’s existing building on the ground floor allowing easy access for both visiting children with carer/family member and staff, with onsite parking, close to all transport links and amenities. Staff retention through its location, facilities and design being an equal priority to get correct as it was to ensure the comfortable, calming and unique environment for children visiting and engaging with the centre.

Stockport council’s goal to re-use buildings of their current building stock to sustain the life by means of futurizing and modernising elements such as heating, insulation, ventilation and waterproofing has been an important driver and has excited tenants such as Pennine Care to undertake long term lease due to their joint environmental and sustainability thinking. In order to modernise, reduce environmental impact and reduce heating costs the building underwent and huge heating upgrade to have a new air source heat pump, insulation was added to the walls, new double glazed windows and LED lighting that was energy efficient and required little future maintenance were all installed. Albeit the project was not to be Bream assessed the importance to ensure we used manufacturers that recycled their waste, travel distance for manufacturers and suppliers were as local to the area as possible were of upmost importance. Using products from the likes of Interface and Polyflor for the flooring and plywood for the joinery, Ecophon for ceiling; companies and products with supportive sustainable and environmental impact assessments. The contractor was also local, together with ourselves as designers and furniture suppliers, etc all to cut down on travel and have a better environmental impact on the project as a whole.

Albeit an existing building the new CAMHS unit was to be sited in, FWP wanted to this facility / look / environment to be far removed from any other CAMHS service elsewhere and start with a blank canvas. Due to the nature of the patients attending the centre with increased anxiety, psychological problems and issues with anger and depression the major part of the brief from Pennine Care was to ensure that the areas did not appear clinical and increase those worries, apprehensions and anxieties. The centre also deals with a not only a wide spectrum of mental and behavioural problems but also a huge age difference from age 4 up to 18 years old.

Our approach was to create a journey from start to finish for the patient that was modern, exciting, that felt grown up but also suited to younger children too. The entrance is playful with exciting colour palette, moss wall, signage that purposely doesn’t state ‘therapy’ using pictures and colour for directional queues instead. The journey down the corridor was one of the most important aspects of the design as from having your named called out and then being taken down a dimly lit, narrow corridor only heightens anxiety before you even arrive into the therapy room. Therefore we widened this approach corridor to 2.5m and up to 4m in areas with touchdown seating, graphic walls and plenty of colour. Each room for therapy was then themed which through service user workshops was chosen by the children for all the themes, one room was even created by a service user applying their artwork for a full digital image wall. The success of the scheme comes from the positive feedback that has been received by users to the Pennine team every day and is testament to all the hard work the clinical team, estates team and FWP team have dedicated to this project.

As it was important to the design impact visually, technically the design had to work also. Rooms that have anti-ligature fittings, doors that required to be anti-barricade, sanitary ware that was anti-ligature and robust, furniture that couldn’t easily be thrown or hurt others. Together with the usual constraints set by HBM to ensure the areas complied to the appropriate health standards.

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