Sygehus Sønderjylland og Psykiatrie, Aabenraa, Region Syddanmark, Denmark

Firm's role on the project: Create a holistic environment inside the hospital walls.
 

The Hospital of Southern Jutland is being built in several stages over the next eight years, and will include both a general and a psychiatric hospital. There will be additions to the existing facilities that will include an acute care clinic, a family house and the psychiatric hospital. The goal of the project is to tie the existing facilities together with several new buildings to create a uniform healing experience for patients, staff and visitors and improve workflow and operational costs. 

The architectural project teams began designing from the exterior and will progress to the interior, providing archetypical rooms and a design manual with easy-to-use instructions for the staff to use. This will allow both the technical and medical staff to design each room as they build, using the pre-approved model and manual as guidelines. 

The challenge is to create a holistic environment inside the hospital walls with an overarching, consistent concept for all interior design solutions that includes use of art and way finding strategies for each of the three additions and the existing facilities. Another challenge is that the design teams will work separately, the facilities will be developed over an eight year period and the architectural project teams design from the exterior inwards. The outcome of the project is to enable the hospital to execute the strategy and concept themselves on an everyday basis.

The project started by involving the end users and began with a day of presentations and workshops followed by focus groups. Thought leaders in various fields were invited to speak and helped to open participant’s minds about new ways to do things and to raise the bar. They taught them about evidence-based design and how the physical environment can be healing and can contribute to improved outcomes and the well-being of patients, staff and visitors.

These workshops were followed by focus groups to allow collection of valuable knowledge from staff and patients. This process fed the design team with this information and the users were challenged to think of new possibilities and improved methods of working. The output from the collected user-involvement process was combined with relevant evidence and an in-depth analysis of different architectural concepts.

It was the hospital's wish to be able to carry out the interior outfitting of the rooms themselves. Therefore, a series of archetypical rooms was identified and the final result of the project was an easy-to-use, practical design manual, for both technical and medical staff to use when outfitting the new hospital, moving the functions around and redecorating and maintaining departments.