Post-occupancy evaluation: Catkin Centre and Sunflower House, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital

But how do we know if they are truly efficient and responsive? We ask the people that use them.

Post Occupancy Evaluations (POEs) are a widely discussed and debated process of looking at how hospitals work once they’ve been in use. The process focuses on engaging with staff, patients and carers to get insight into their experience, evaluating the way the building functions against its vision.

Of course, no one wants to give any one cause to criticise their multi-million-pound investment, which often have had to overcome years of bureaucracy and uncertainty to come to fruition. However, POEs are essential if we want to progress the quality of design in healthcare buildings and enable them to truly serve the needs of their communities. In-depth evaluations can inform future processes and systems, lead to more efficient designs and allow design disciplines to learn from the outcome of each other’s work.

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust boldly gave MJ Medical permission to undertake and publish a POE of its newly built paediatric mental health units.

“If we truly want to improve the NHS and build better hospitals that provide not just useful, but cutting-edge services for our communities, we must capture and reflect on user feedback. While findings from this evaluation will be hugely useful to improving the experience for staff and patients at the Catkin Centre and Sunflower House, we hope it will also inform future similar developments. We are looking to help develop this learning further and would be keen to know if any other project teams would be interested in conducting some more multi-site studies,” said David Powell, Development Director at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.

The Catkin Centre and Sunflower House, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital
The Catkin Centre and Sunflower House provide a holistic approach to children’s mental health services at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Designed by Cullinan Studio and constructed by Galliford Try, the twin buildings house inpatient and outpatient paediatric psychiatric care units. Within the space, healthcare workers offer a range of specialist services for young people facing the most challenging mental health conditions.We recently visited the units to see how employees, patients and their carers felt about them. Read the full report here. Here’s a short summary of what we found:

The strengths:
Key areas of positive feedback included:

• Through its use of glass to harness natural light and to showcase the surrounding green spaces, and carefully considered décor featuring natural wood and neutral colours, the building achieves an unanimously appreciated relaxing and therapeutic effect.
• By engaging children in the design process, the designers have created spaces that patients enjoy. The bedrooms, diner, therapy rooms, outside spaces and communal areas largely meet patients’ and carers’ needs.
• Carers, patients and employees we interviewed spoke positively about the therapy and counselling rooms; the generous size and access to natural light and views were noted and well-received.

Areas that could be improved:
Of all the responses we received, three stood out.

• Size matters – Patients, carers, and employees felt they could benefit from a few larger areas. This included a sensory room and a height and weight room, where some said that increasing the space would allow more people to use them and make them more fit-for-purpose. Others fed back that bigger patient lounges would allow for larger group activities. Employees championed for greater spaces where they could rest, hang out with colleagues or work.
• Reflecting on the use of glass – While most people appreciate the warmth and therapeutic effects of natural light, future designs should review window orientation, solar shading to prevent overheating and glare, and ways to protect patient privacy.
• Reducing anxiety within phlebotomy units – Concerned carers called for a more considered location for the waiting areas for phlebotomy rooms. While an efficient use of space, situating the patients outside phlebotomy rooms means they can overhear the cries or shouts of distressed children receiving blood work.

In summary:
The Catkin Centre and Sunflower House provides a much-needed service for young people struggling with mental health issues. It brings healthcare professionals together under one roof, where they were previously spread across sites.  The impressive interior design and layout is extremely well considered in terms of the wellness of patients, carers, and workers.

Stakeholder engagement plays an essential role in the design process, especially after occupation; it is incredibly valuable to see how patients, carers, and workers actually experience the healthcare environment in-use. With this insight, we can improve the quality of their care and experience and that of others in other future facilities. Post occupancy evaluations, like this, play an important role in progressing healthcare design more widely. As humans, we learn from experience and as healthcare planners and designers, we learn from listening to patients, carers, and health workers who use the facilities we build.

We’d like to thank Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, the patients and carers for taking part in the evaluation and for the valuable insight they’ve provided to us.