FEATURE ARTICLES

Safehinge Primera says it worked with architects, clinicians, facilities managers, infection control leads, and other key stakeholders, for 18 months to develop its award-winning Safehinge Symphony en-suite door.

Catherine Helliker, marketing manager at danfloor UK, a specialist manufacturer and supplier of commercial carpet, explains how danfloor helps architects and designers create spaces which are not only fit for purpose aesthetically and practically for service-users, patients, and staff, but are also able to withstand demanding use.

Oxehealth claims to be the world’s first company to offer technology that enables clinicians and carers to monitor human activity and vital signs ‘totally contact-free’ using only mass-produced optical sensors.

The design manager at specialist in electronic water efficiency controls, Dart Valley Systems, describes its approach to manufacturing for mental healthcare and other ‘secure’ applications.

A director at Medical Architecture discusses the imagination, thought, and collaboration that went into the design of a new adult autism inpatient unit at Morpeth’s Northgate Hospital, reportedly the UK’s first building specifically created for this service-user group.

Kent-headquartered Kingsway Group – a DIMHN member which designs and manufactures high quality doorsets, vision panels, and anti-ligature hardware – says it is in business ‘to push limits, challenge thinking, invest, and do what it takes to move safety and design in mental health environments to the next level’. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, visited the company’s headquarters to find out more about this fast-growing, forward-thinking business from sales director, Julian Hall.

A new inpatient mental healthcare building at Fieldhead Hospital in Wakefield which welcomed its first patients last month provides comfortable, flexible, and therapeutic accommodation for adult acute and older service-users to help speed recovery and a return to ‘normal life’. Replacing older, outdated villa-style accommodation, the £16.8 million Unity Centre will, on the completion of all the facilities next year, incorporate separate adult acute male and female wards, an older people’s ward, a psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU), and high quality activity, leisure, eating, and outdoor spaces, including a third lounge where patients of both sexes can mix and socialise. As The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from the project team, the development is the biggest seen on the site for over a decade.

Speaking at May’s Design in Mental Health 2017 conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, DIMHN chair, Jenny Gill, associate director at Medical Architecture, Lianne Knotts, and director of Technical Publishing Services, Sue Holding, explained how they had worked closely together over the past year to produce a new Health Building Note, HBN 03-02, recently published, which provides guidance on the effective and age-appropriate design and construction of CAMHS facilities. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Among the many varied presentations at May’s Design in Mental Health 2017 conference in Solihull was one entitled ‘Fire safety in mental health’ in which Karen Byard, fire officer, Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, discussed an effective approach to ensuring and maintaining fire safety in mental healthcare facilities, and some of the challenges faced, drawing on the Trust’s experience in both acute inpatient facilities and service-users’ own homes. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

With both organisations having felt for some time that there was a lack of tailor-made and specific guidance on how to design and build high quality psychiatric intensive care units (or PICUs), the Design in Mental Health Network (DIMHN) and the National Association of Psychiatric Intensive Care and Low Secure units (NAPICU) have been working for the past year and a half on producing such a document – which they officially launched at the Design in Mental Health 2017 conference in Solihull in mid-May. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Phil Barsby, business development director at Intastop, a leader in providing solutions and products to address anti-ligature needs, explains the priority of patient safety at mental health establishments and NHS Trusts across the country, and the part that doortop alarms play in saving lives.

With the Mental Health Foundation’s National Mental Health Awareness Week 2017 having taken place just days before Design in Mental Health 2017 in Solihull, it was fitting that the guest speakers at this year’s DIMH Awards Dinner were award-winning mental health campaigners, Jonny Benjamin and his friend, Neil Laybourn, the man who persuaded him not to jump from the edge of London’s Waterloo Bridge one wintry January day in 2008 during a severe bout of depression. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

In the keynote presentation at May’s Design in Mental Health 2017 conference, delegates heard from Lord Nigel Crisp, a cross-bench member of the House of Lords who was NHS CEO and Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health from 2000-2006, and now chairs an Independent Commission set up in 2015 to address the issues facing adult acute mental healthcare patients in England. He discussed the background to, and findings of, a Commission report which found that ‘access to acute care for severely ill adult mental health patients is inadequate nationally and, in some cases, potentially dangerous’.

If one reads the reports in many national and local newspapers today, our hospitals are overwhelmed with people queuing to get in and others queuing to get out. Here architect and Mental Health lead for the design and technology practice, IBI Group, Wendy de Silva considers what a whole system approach to keeping people out of hospital would look like.

In a year that has seen considerable Government focus on mental healthcare, next month’s Design in Mental Healthcare 2017 event should provide plenty to talk about, with a packed conference programme featuring over 30 speakers, the Network’s annual Awards Dinner, and the chance to see a wide range of products and services from over 45 companies in the accompanying exhibition. The Network reports.

Opened in October 2015, The Curve in Prestwich, described by its architects, Gilling Dod, as ‘a ground-breaking, community-facing, mental health resource hub specifically designed to support vulnerable people living in the community’, has since won a number of awards, and has been widely praised by both service-users and staff. Gilling Dod reports for The Network.

The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports on a visit to Pineapple Contract Furniture’s highly impressive Aylesford office and manufacturing base in Kent. Here he discovered that fundamental to the company’s growing success in mental healthcare has been developing a range with a design, features, and ‘style’, that reflect the views, experience, and preferences, of both healthcare providers and service-users – for whom the quality of the furniture they encounter daily can ‘make or break’ the comfort and ambience of the care environment.

The £242 million redevelopment scheme to, as the West London Mental Health (WLMHT) NHS Trust puts it, ‘transport the 150-year old Broadmoor Hospital into the 21st century’ is progressing well, with the first patients due to move from the existing Victorian-built hospital to the new facilities later this year. As The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered during a visit to the construction site, the new buildings will provide single bedrooms with washroom facilities for 210 male patients, and space for 24 ‘flexible beds’, in light and airy modern accommodation, together with an extensive range of activities designed to speed recovery for patients receiving treatment at the high secure facility.

Derek Quinn, technical manager at Pensher Skytech, which designs and manufactures bespoke, high specification blast-resistant doors, windows, curtain wall, and modular buildings, outlines the company’s approach to developing doors and windows that are not only well-designed, secure, robust, and innovatively engineered, but also help enhance the service-user environment, give service-users a degree of control, and help speed recovery. As he explains, all the products are exhaustively tested to ensure that they will stand the test of time and the rigours of even the most ‘extreme’ environments.

According to the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death, the failure to integrate physical and mental healthcare by hospitals means patients with mental health issues get poor care.