A year in summary: Healthcare

Mark Rowe

Principal London
Perkins&Will

HEALTHCARE
Mark Rowe, Principal, Penoyre & Prasad

The final NLA Expert Healthcare Panel meeting of the year sought to pull together the various strands of discussion over the previous two years into a handful of key policy recommendations. The policy areas discussed can be summarised as follows:

That the estates of London’s major hospitals would benefit from masterplanning collaboratively with Local Authorities and the GLA on a generational timescale to avoid piecemeal and sometimes incoherent accretion over time. It was commented how the missing role in such a process might be the City or Borough Architect as per some European models.
The ability of the Mayor to support, lead-by-example or underwrite in relation to the development of NHS primary/community care infrastructure within the city to support the wider health and wellbeing of the population. It was also discussed how similar outcomes might be achieved by NHS Property Services behaving more entrepreneurially, equivalent to the work of LocateEd within the education sphere.
That, if the move towards retrofit first across the development sector is to be fully embraced within healthcare, then relevant planning policy will need to be stringently enforced without deferment to statements of optimal clinical need. Reciprocally, NHS design guidance will require revision to indicate the type and degrees of derogation which should be entertained in order to make building retention, refurbishment and reuse a viable possibility.

Mark Rowe

Principal London
Perkins&Will