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 Replacing older, outdated villa-style accommodation, the £16.8 million Unity Centre will, on the completion of all the facilities next year, incorporate separate adult acute male and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.
Currently under construction by Interserve at Fieldhead Hospital under a four-phase ProCure21+ scheme, the Unity Centre is scheduled for completion in late 2018, although the new adult acute wards for male and female service-users were completed and moved into last month. Designed by Leeds-based architects, Enable by Design, the new inpatient facility is being built for South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, an NHS Foundation Trust that provides community, mental health, and learning disability services to the people of Barnsley, Calderdale, Kirklees, and Wakefield and Pontefract, plus some medium secure (forensic) services to the whole of Yorkshire and the Humber.
To find out more, I met up recently at the hospital with the Trust’s head of Estates & Facilities, Nick Phillips, senior capital planning manager, Sally Ironfield, and the lead architect on the scheme, Steve Batson, a director at Enable by Design. Nick Phillips explained that the Trust’s main inpatient sites are at Fieldhead Hospital, and at Kendray Hospital in Barnsley; it also has inpatient wards at Dewsbury Hospital and at the Calderdale Royal Infirmary in Halifax, plus two standalone rehabilitation units. He said: “Here at Fieldhead we already have a medium secure site – Newton Lodge, a low secure service at the Bretton and Newhaven Units, a non-secure mental health inpatient unit, and a standalone learning disability facility. The Unity Centre will replace the current adult and elderly acute inpatient accommodation and PICU here.”
Fieldhead Hospital was built in the 1970s, originally as a learning disability and special education facility; the site has since seen significant expansion. “The inpatient wards we have demolished to make way for the Unity Centre were in villa-style buildings which were significantly improved in the early 1990s, but, two decades later, were no longer fit-for-purpose,” Nick Phillips explained. “While we had undertaken piecemeal redevelopment here, we had no overall site strategy, so worked with Wilmott Dixon in 2012/2013 to develop one. “This identified that the existing acute inpatient wards couldn’t be developed any further without significant, unacceptable compromises. The buildings overhauled in the 1990s were single-storey villas built on a square design with central courtyard spaces, no en suite facilities, fewer bathrooms, and relatively limited day space with quite low roofs.”
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