Mercy General Lego City Hospital

In recent years, health and healthcare have become prominent factors in measuring socioeconomic progress. At the same time, our expectations have increased enormously and more resources than ever are being invested in health. This was the basis for an international conference, hosted by Rambøll, that took place Thursday 11. November in Copenhagen.

Founding partner of Gehl Architects, Helle Søholt, was one of the speakers at the conference. Other speakers included the health minister of Denmark Bertel Haarder (Image), Torben Stentoft, Hospital Director of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen; Paul Kingsmore, IHEEM president and Director of Health Facilities from Scotland and Adrian Sprague, Director of Design Management with Skanska Public.

The main focus of the conference was to Think ahead on how to develop hospitals of world-class quality while at the same time ensuring cost effectiveness.

The minister presented the national strategy of arriving at 18 super hospitals in Denmark, with a billion kroner investment in the coming years. The super hospitals he compared with airports – system focused and flexible buildings and organizations. The focus of his talk was on the need for centralization of knowledge and skills in highly technical centers, but a number of related themes where mentioned such as needed increased outpatient placements and increased development of it systems supporting the goal of these future super hospitals to only host patients in 24-48 hours.

Helle Søholt talked about the role of hospitals in cities, and how large hospitals grow into hospital cities needing to integrate facilities, functions and activities with the surrounding urban context.

Today’s hospitals are closed campus areas often placed far from an urban setting. These areas represent a lack of value adding by co-location and creating of synergies. The current focus of planning is primarily on costs and energy savings arriving at larger and more efficient building machines with the risk of alienating people and patients in the process. The needed paradigm shift in planning also needs to entail the hospital sector. Current and future changes in lifestyle and general health conditions of people calls for hospitals, that are open and accessible for all.

Helle Søholt presented four needed concepts in modern planning of hospitals enabling these large institutions to tap into the urban health resource:

• Quality of Life – calling for the hospital to change from a medical centre for treatments to a learning environment for healthy lifestyles reaching out into the surrounding communities. Future technology will enable outpatients to be helped and monitored in their preferred surroundings at home, and the hospitals become facilitators of a health process taking co-responsibility for the quality of life of people in society.
• Hospitality – questioning how the hospital can act as a host making people feel welcome, safe and invited. And at an urban scale a host and facilitator of the development of a people friendly and mixed use environment, ensuring synergy and added value of large public investments.
• Openness – ensuring permeability on an urban scale through the hospital districts, and a high level of mobility and integration between the hospital and the city. Many activities indoors can be naturally linked visually, spatially and physically with the urban spaces outside, ensuring life in the areas overall, feeling of safety and attractiveness.
• Life first – Finally addressing the need to involve patients, citizens and key actors in the surrounding community in the design, development and building of future hospitals. There is a need to design the hospital districts with people’s needs and behavior in mind, as a constant and living vision.

World class hospitals cannot be cost effective by not tapping into the urban health resource or by not addressing the needs of people and humanistic design of both buildings and the future urban areas.

We need to think ahead and explore the role of the future urban “hospitals for people”.

Check out Helle Søholts presentation here:

Rambøll had excellently organized this conference program ensuring professional input from both the hospital management sector, the political national level, from large contractors and builders to designers and planners.

Check out the conference website here.