Designing for seamless emergency care

Here Adrian Hitchcock, who fulfils this senior role, and is also lead architect on one of the two schemes – The Grange University Hospital in Gwent – discusses a pair of projects that the practice hopes will act as exemplars for the future of healthcare design. 

BDP is midway through a £193.5 million project to develop the new The Grange University Hospital in Wales, currently in delivery by construction and engineering experts, Laing O’Rourke, and has recently completed a new emergency assessment centre at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough in Berkshire. Both projects put the patient pathway at the heart of the design, with the aim of reducing patient internal travel times, streamlining assessment to treatment times, and reducing overnight bed occupancy.

The Wexham Park project was completed in partnership with construction giant, Kier, in late 2018, with the scheme part of the Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust’s redevelopment of the Heatherwood and Wexham Park sites. The original single-storey building that the new emergency assessment centre replaced had been extended horizontally over the years, resulting in long travel times for both staff and patients. The priority for the new building was to create a four-storey assessment and emergency unit which brought together ‘ED’ services, 24- hour assessments, and short-stay medical and surgical services, for the first time. By co-locating the services there is improved opportunity for collaboration between clinical teams, enabling patients to be diagnosed and treated faster, often without the need to be admitted overnight. In addition, the ambulance bay seamlessly connects to a resuscitation area, helping to improve emergency care times