Striking design for Cramlington facility

Ensuring that those with serious or life-threatening emergency care needs receive treatment in centres ‘with the right facilities and expertise to maximise chances of survival and a good recovery’ was one of five key priorities set out in a new ‘vision’ for urgent and emergency care services across England drawn up by NHS England during 2013. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, recently visited one of England’s first new such healthcare facilities – the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital in Northumberland – which admitted its first patients last June as England’s first new-build hospital to have emergency care consultants on site ‘24/7’. Here he discovered how ‘lateral thinking’, multidisciplinary input, the creativity of the architects, and extensive use of 3D modelling, helped create both the optimal layout, and a dramatically different design, for the new hospital. 

The staff and management of the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust – which operates the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital in Cramlington, Northumberland – are understandably proud to have opened England’s first purpose-built hospital of its kind, and indeed both the quality of the services, and the building’s radical design – with its circular hubs, curves, and sweeping canopies – have won widespread praise. Visiting the hospital, I had an interesting two-hour discussion with key members of the project team, who explained the background to its construction, and described both the advanced facilities it provides, and the thinking behind the clinical and other adjacencies. Project director, Paul Brayson, the Trust’s head of capital development, began: “The new hospital at East Cramlington is part of the NHS’s general desire to do things better. Research going back over a decade had concluded that the best thing for a patient in an emergency situation was to be seen by a specialist as soon in the treatment journey as possible. It has also been widely acknowledged that having specialists available, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is key to improving emergency and urgent care outcomes. In many hospitals, however, this has never been a reality; this hospital set out to break the mould.” 

A diverse and sizeable catchment