Bringing some fun to a daunting experience

During a tour of the unit, Derick Harrison, project lead, and the Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s capital project manager (for this scheme), explained to HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie that, from the outset, the project team was also determined to create the UK’s best children’s renal facility yet. Funded by a combination of £1.5 m raised by listeners to BBC Radio West Midlands as part of the station’s “Kidney Kids” appeal, and a £1 m donation from the British Kidney Patient Association, the new renal unit, located within what has come to be known as the “Burns and Education Wing” at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, admitted its first patients in early February, with a more “official opening” planned for later this year. The unit, designed by the Trust’s project team in conjunction with local architects Pinnegar Hayward Design, and built by Weaver (part of the Building Division of Da Vinci Construction UK), has an interior which Derick Harrison proudly told me is “as far away from a traditional hospital as it was possible to achieve”. “What we really wanted to avoid was the old idea of a ward as a straight corridor with square boxes off it,” he explained. To that end the walls are curved and chamfered, bed bay areas feature curved profiling on the ceiling, walls are replaced in several instances with special “switch glass” which can be turned “opaque” at the touch of a button, providing both privacy and a degree of insulation from adjacent noise, and decoration is with warm, “comforting” colours. Derick Harrison said: “I personally prefer curves to straight lines where possible interior design-wise. Of course the unit must function really well both clinically and practically, but I also wanted to make the whole atmosphere – within a unit in which young patients may spend anything from several hours for haemodialysis, to a number of days for treatment for some cancers and other conditions – less scary, with a ‘feelgood factor’ often missing in a traditional clinical environment. Wall protection, for instance, is applied not in straight horizontal lines, but instead in wavy patterns in cheerful oranges and blues, decorated with star patterns, while the individual bays are actually outlined in different-coloured swirling lines, and the flooring designed with curved patterns which automatically lead the visitor through the wards.”

Built into an extension

The unit has been incorporated into a vacant floor of an extension built onto the north of the Birmingham Children’s Hospital site three years ago by BAM (at the time HBG) under an £18 m ProCure21 contract. On the extension’s top floor is a neonatal surgery unit, with the hospital’s Burns Centre immediately below this, above the renal unit. The lower ground floor below the new kidney unit houses the hospital’s Education Centre. The kidney unit itself is situated on the first floor of the new extension, although, Derick Harrison explained, “this is the ground floor relative to the main hospital, due to the slope of the site”. While treatment for renal conditions was previously undertaken in what Derick Harrison described as “a dark, and frankly unprepossessing” basement floor close by, in the adjoining 1960s-built Emergency Department block (which had been used for this purpose since the Children’s Hospital relocated to the site 12 years ago from Ladywood), the new unit, in contrast, is light and airy (the previous unit had few windows and thus received little natural light) and, unlike its predecessor, enjoys good external views, looking out onto the nearby St Chad’s Queensway. The unit is set to treat annually an estimated 1,500 youngsters from all over the East and West Midlands, and parts of Wales. Fittingly, many of the colourful and eye-catching internal features were a result of close liaison with young patients and their families, as well as nursing staff, during the project’s planning, to determine what features the youngsters would most like to see. The floor pattern in the outpatients’ area, for instance, resembles a stream, with circles of pebbles in the circulation areas, and grass in the seating areas; when patients were asked what feature they most wanted in the new unit “something to do with water” was top of the list. Several photographs of pools, fish, and porcupines, were also manipulated by the children using computer graphics programmes, as part of a co-ordinated artwork strategy, to create eye-catching pictures and murals.