A psychiatrist’s view on what makes better buildings

Professor Fiona Mason, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, and the chief medical officer at St Andrew’s Healthcare, a leading charity providing specialist NHS care, is also an associate registrar for Leadership and Management at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and a Trustee and Council member of the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management. Having trained in general psychiatry at south London’s The Maudsley Hospital, she subsequently became a lecturer in Victimology and Forensic Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, and worked as a consultant in the NHS – including a six-year spell at the high secure Broadmoor Hospital from 1996-2001 – before joining St Andrew’s Healthcare in 2001, originally as a consultant forensic psychiatrist.

A recognised leader in women’s mental health and healthcare management and leadership, she regularly advises, teaches, and publishes on, both subjects. In introducing the Professor, Design In Mental Health Network (DIMHN) President, Joe Forster, said St Andrew’s would be well-known to many involved in designing for mental health ‘because of the way that the charity had built, and managed, its estate’. The Network had also had contact with the charity and its mental healthcare teams ‘for many years’.

Opening her presentation, Professor Mason said that while when treating the mentally unwell it was ‘important to think about disease and illness’, the profession also needed to focus on service-users’ wellbeing, their ‘lives in general’, their relationships, their employment, and their social circumstances. She told delegates: “It’s one of the things that first attracted me to psychiatry; that I got to treat the whole person, not just a leg, arm, or other bit of broken body”. Stressing that her interest in the pursuit of excellent care had been with her throughout her career, she explained that earlier in her ‘professional journey’ she had started thinking ‘not only about that individual sitting in front of me requiring services, but also their family, and the impact what I was doing would have on them’. She added: “This applied beyond the individual service-user, to the group of service-users on a ward, or to the people being served by a hospital in a defined population.”