but also in terms of development and other targets, at borough, city, county, or national level..
As at Reading, our primary focus was on the quality of the user experience for patients and staff, as well as the efficiency and usability of the building..In 2012 we won the Best Patient Experience Award for Circle Reading at the Building Better Healthcare awards.. Hospital Design for flexibility and change.
We also worked hard to make sure that the design of the hospital was flexible and adaptable.One recurring issue with hospitals is that the technology they house develops at pace and, as we have seen this year, the demands hospitals face can change very quickly.Both of these mean that traditional approaches to hospital design and construction come with obsolescence as standard.. Our intelligent design, on the other hand, had future-proofing and flexibility built in.
We had an early opportunity to prove the value of this, when Circle Health decided to expand vertically and double the size of the hospital during the construction phase.We achieved this with very little disruption.. Design to Value means rigorously assessing every part of a project using a wide variety of value criteria, which come from the client and from the sector more broadly.
Our Platforms approach to Design for Manufacture and Assembly (P-DfMA) bakes value into the process by bringing the benefits of manufacturing to the design and construction process.
This combined approach can be applied to any building type, but we have seen huge benefits when the buildings we design are particularly complex, or house particularly complex systems and processes..This direct client contact has given us the opportunity to create a distinct identity as a team, and a distinct position within the industry.
It also required us to develop skills that internal-facing teams don’t need.Having our own clients presents us with a range of questions that we have to answer, and it requires a particular set of capabilities.
We create solutions and give them to clients – for them to use.That means our product has to work independently of us – it has to achieve a level of external usability and stability..