Conceived to have a community feel

HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, visited the new facility, plans for which were first mooted in 1956, to discover from project director, Andrew Hughes, why it was so badly needed, and discuss its design and construction with BAM Construction’s construction manager, Dave Ellis. An architectural standpoint is provided by project associate at Nightingale Associates, Anthony Keats.

 Handed over to the client Trust, the South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, on schedule, in early September, and with patients moving in on 23 September, The Redwoods Centre in Bicton Heath is an attractively constructed, modern inpatient healthcare centre for adult mentally unwell people, equipped with 100 per cent singlebed en suite bedrooms. According to the Trust’s project director, Andrew Hughes, it was designed, from the outset, to have a ‘distinctly domestic style’ that would make the facility feel ‘more like a home than a hospital’. The new buildings are located on a 10- acre site on land to the south of the cricket ground at the back of the existing Shelton Hospital – itself a striking Victorian-built mental healthcare facility designed by George Gilbert Scott (the great grandfather of the architect who designed London’s Battersea Power Station and Britain’s famous red public telephone boxes) and William B Moffat, which itself opened in 1845. At the height of its use, Shelton Hospital housed up to 1,000 inpatients at any one time. The Redwoods Centre, named after local Redwood trees, will provide 112 mental healthcare inpatient beds for adult acute, organic mental health, and low secure mental healthcare patients, from throughout Shropshire, Telford, Wrekin, and Powys. The care model provided, strongly in accord with the broader national focus in mental healthcare, will aim to reduce inpatient stay length wherever practicable. Up until now, the South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust reports, the average stay length for adult acute inpatients at Shelton Hospital and the region’s other adult mental healthcare facilities has been around 33 days, but the goal is to reduce this to 23 days or less, with patients supported in the community by larger, and more specialised, community teams.

Sixteen-bedded blocks