The Future Healthcare Journal is published by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). And in a recent paper the future of the hospital has been debated (Edwards, 2023).
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, rumours of the death of the hospital have been greatly exaggerated; or at least that would appear to be one of the core conclusions from the latest Wolfson Economics Prize. The Prize is funded by the Wolfson Foundation, which is an independent grant-making charity aiming to improve the civic health of society through education and research.
The Wolfson Economics Prize asked how new hospitals should be designed to radically improve patient experiences, clinical outcomes, staff wellbeing and integration with wider health and social care. With a major programme to rebuild and renew hospitals in England underway, the Prize offered an opportunity to understand current thinking about hospitals and their future place.
Five dominant themes were identified:
- A calming environment
- Systems of care (systematic, organised, simple)
- Distribution of services (across geographies)
- Use of technology (especially information technology, IT)
- Going green.
The previous approach to building new hospitals, with its over-riding drive to reduce costs, has not served the UK well.
The authors concluded,
New ways of thinking about hospital building and design are urgently needed, especially the funding of research and the creation of a national repository devoted to design solutions and post-build evaluations of new hospitals”.
