Existing healthcare design guidance – mainly Health Building Notes and Health Technical Memoranda – is a vital part of health facility design but, Architects for Health (AfH) believes, is ‘increasingly out of date and suffering from lack of recent investment’.
To address this, AfH held an industrywide roundtable in Leeds to debate the guidance’s future; a key recommendation was to conduct an industry-wide survey to establish views and patterns of use for guidance, and help inform future development/direction. Now ‘live’ at www.tinyurl.com/ybz3lp5c, and the AfH home page (www.architectsforhealth.com), the survey is open to anyone who uses, or has used, design guidance, until the late autumn. AfH is keen ‘to encourage a really wide-ranging debate on the future of healthcare guidance, and thus to gain broad agreement on the way forward’.
Attracting delegates from the NHS, private sector, and universities, the roundtable explored the background, current position, and future options. It was chaired by Prof. John Cole, former head of Estates for Northern Ireland.
The conclusions and recommendations, and a full report, can be viewed on the AfH website, or directly at www.tinyurl.com/y9dfpknm
