Can the NHS do a better job at isolating patients?

Jamie Brewster, Associate Director at MJ Medical, has spent the last 25 years designing clinical spaces for hospitals around the world. A key part of his job is talking to doctors, nurses, and patients to understand how they use rooms and what features they find important. Such perspectives drive what the industry refers to as stakeholder-led design, an approach Jamie wholly supports.

In 2020, Jamie was diagnosed with Leukemia. A three-week stint in hospital isolation for STEM cell transplantation led him to question every room he had ever designed.

He’s now on a mission to understand others’ experience of clinical isolation and to figure out how, through better UK design standards, we can improve them. It’s something he’ll be speaking about this weekend at a conference hosted by the Architectural Humanities Research Association at University of Liverpool School of Architecture.

In his interim paper, he shares what his initial research has taught him. He identifies the current knowledge gaps and lays out what he hopes to uncover as part of his PhD at the Welsh School of Architecture.

Read his paper: Experiential and environmental dimensions of inpatient isolation bedrooms