FEATURE ARTICLES

Julian Hall, Sales director at Kingsway Group, describes the company’s ‘five-step approach’ to door safety, developed with the benefit and experience of many hundreds of successful installations in mental healthcare facilities.

Joe Forster, recalls the DIMHN’s earliest days, and explains how its origins lie in shifts in thinking early in the new Millennium about the sort of environments that were needed to provide effective 21st-century mental healthcare.

Dr Christina Malathouni, and Haziq Khairi, University who has been working with her on research into mental health facilities UK-wide, consider Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust’s ‘unique approach’ to its contemporary mental health facilities.

Last November’s ‘virtual’ Design in Mental Health Network 2020 AGM saw Jenny Gill, among the organisation’s longest-standing members, and the Network’s Chair since 2013, step down from both the role and the DiMHN Board.

How a fascinating historical site, and a close working relationship between Kajima, Sir Robert McAlpine, and a Mental Health NHS Trust, has helped unlock the estate modernisation of the Springfield University Hospital in Wandsworth.

The Design in Mental Health Network and multidisciplinary building science centre, BRE have jointly developed a guide to testing a broad spectrum of products used in mental healthcare facilities to ensure fitness for purpose.

Freelance writer, Debbie Giggle, talks to Antonio Lourenco, Global Product manager at Altro, about what the flooring and wall cladding specialist dubs ‘an innovative collaborative research project to assist safety and wellbeing in acute mental health wards through better design of buildings, components, fixtures, and fittings’.

Design engineers, Safehinge Primera, are passionate about working alongside mental healthcare providers to develop products that create safe spaces for recovery.

Peter Moran, Director at Todd Architects, considers how using light, colour, and scale, can promote independence and wellbeing for residents in dementia-friendly housing, in turn helping to combat isolation and minimise stress.

Pineapple Contracts has recently unveiled two pieces of furniture designed to make physical intervention practices in the mental healthcare sector safer and more dignified for patients, as well as staff. Daniel White, the company’s head of Sales, explains how the products were developed, and the rationale behind them.

In the January 2020 The Network, Katharine Lazenby, who spent more time in her 20s in mental healthcare facilities than at home, but is now on the road to recovery, discussed with editor, Jonathan Baillie, some of her at times challenging and difficult experiences as an inpatient service-user.

Derek Shepherd, a director at P+HS Architects, describes the many different architectural, aesthetic, clinical, and service-user-centric elements the practice took into account in creating a new adult and older people’s acute inpatient mental healthcare facility in York for the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.

It is now almost three years since Crittall, an Essex-based window manufacturer with a history spanning well over a century, acquired the trade and assets of Fendor – a specialist designer and manufacturer of high security, ballistic, and bomb-proof fenestration, which also supplies windows to the custodial, mental health, and petrochemical industries.

The IAD Company, an award-winning Cardiff-based not-for-profit design consultancy, recently successfully redeveloped a number of ruined agricultural barns on the Welsh coast into a set of ‘forever homes’ for adults living with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Katharine Lazenby has extensive ‘lived experience’ as a mental health service-user, having, in her 20s, been admitted to inpatient facilities 10 times over a 13-year period. Now firmly on the path to recovery, she works to help others with mental ill health get better, feel more ‘in control’, and regain their equilibrium.

Richard Mazuch, an architect and designer, and the director of Design Research and Innovation at IBI Group, looks at some of the effects of different domestic environments, designs, and characteristics, on mental health.

With, as he puts it, ‘funding shortfalls in the billions, year-long wait times for CAMHS referrals, and young people in crisis being left in limbo’, Phil Tottman, the developer of Book of Beasties:

Teal LifeCare designs, develops, and manufactures furniture to meet the specific needs of service-users with dementia, challenging behaviour, learning disabilities, eating disorders, autism, and a variety of mental health conditions.

The use of seclusion and restraint in mental healthcare settings, and how such practices use can be reduced in line with ‘more 21st century’ thinking, and more ‘humane’ ways of dealing with extremely distressed or, on occasions, violent service-users, was the subject of an afternoon session on the first day of this year’s Design in Mental Health 2019 conference.

Former Minister of State for Care and Support, the Rt. Honorable Sir Norman Lamb MP, a passionate mental health campaigner and advocate for equal public funding for physical and mental health, gave one of the opening keynotes on Day Two of this year’s Design in Mental Health conference in Coventry, drawing on his experience both as an MP and Minister, and his extensive and committed work ‘behind the scenes’ as a champion of first-class mental healthcare provision fit for the 21st century. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.