World Health Day 2017

#WorldHealthDay 2017 focusses on the theme of depression and mental wellbeing. As Architects, we need to consider how the environments we help to create support our aspiration to enhance the health and wellbeing of communities. In our work, we seek to ensure that our buildings enable the interactions with health services and enhance the user experience through light, colour, ease of access and comfort.

We believe that our work is about enabling connections and bringing people together – patients and health practitioners, clinical and community health services, architects, artists and engineers. This is richly demonstrated through our many collaborations – for example with the artist Morag Myerscough in Sheffield Childrens’ Hospital and with Kennedy Fitzgerald Architects in Northern Ireland delivering a suite of acclaimed community health and hospital buildings. These enrich the process of design and the experience of the members of public and dedicated professionals who are at the centre of what we do.

We believe that in the UK and beyond, we need to maintain a sharp focus on continuing to improve and innovate within our built environment to deliver the aims of this #WorldHealthDay 2017 campaign.