Tessa Jowell Health Centre Post-Occupancy Evaluation

First opened in 2020, the Tessa Jowell Health Centre in Dulwich, south London, provides a range of healthcare services to the community through multiple primary, community, mental health, and acute healthcare providers. Services delivered from the centre including primary care, children’s services, diagnostics, physiotherapy, community mental health services, a renal dialysis unit and services for patients with long term conditions.

As part of our ongoing Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) research stream, we are undertaking a POE of the building some three years after it first opened. Focusing on how different groups of users experience its functionality, we will use a variety of different tools to engage with those users to systematically evaluate the performance of the building. Through the POE we seek to answer some of the following questions:

• Revealing how a building is being used and identifying any inefficiencies if a building or space is not being used as intended
• Identifying if the building meets the desired functional requirements of the people who use it
• Understanding what would be done differently if the facility was to be re-designed from scratch
• Improving decision making on future projects in terms of design and project delivery.

The POE was undertaken over three days by our team in January 2024. It consisted of three elements; patient and staff surveys, face to face interviews and observational studies. The data collected is currently being analysed and collated into a report and presentation, which will be delivered at the European Healthcare Design conference in London in June 2024 (https://europeanhealthcaredesign.salus.global).