BDP sweeps the board at The European Healthcare Design Awards

The Lousia Martindale building represents the very latest standards in healthcare design. It is expected that more than 100,000 patients a year will be treated across 13 floors in the purpose-designed environments with clinical and support accommodation facilities providing a once-in-a-generation improvement for staff and patients requiring hospital care from across Sussex.

BDP’s design provides major new facilities for multiple wards and departments and fits a large-scale hospital building sensitively into its historic context in a constrained site. The mass of the building is broken down into fingers, which contain the bulk of the ward accommodation. All the patient rooms face south with views over the English Channel, increasing a connection with the outdoors and the calming scenes of the sea.

The interior design strategy at the Louisa Martindale building fosters connections between the hospital and surrounding communities and landscapes, celebrating Brighton, Sussex, the coast, and the unique character and cultures of the communities that live there. The design presents a new narrative - allocating a theme to each ‘finger’ of the new building. Each theme has an associated colour palette, artwork, and wayfinding, providing legibility and transparency in navigating the building to help reduce stress for all users.

The award-winning design for a Children’s Cancer Centre at the world-famous Great Ormond Street Hospital presents a crucial, innovative and flexible building that houses wards, a cancer day care centre, new surgical theatres, an intensive care unit, and an imaging centre. The design plays with ideas of ‘House’ and ‘Garden’, with conscious allusions to home life scattered throughout the building. It evolved from early-stage consultations with GOSH’s ‘Young Person’s Forum’, a group of young patients who chose ‘nature’, ‘home away from home’ and ‘indoor-outdoor’ as prevailing themes.

Andrew Smith, head of healthcare at BDP, said: “It has been an outstanding year for our healthcare design team. We have delivered some of the UK’s most important buildings – buildings that enhance levels of care, progress research and innovation and create comfortable and safe environments for those who use and work in them.

“We continue to show that we are the prominent, multidisciplinary house of design for the healthcare industry, producing world-first designs that showcase BDP at its integrated best. As a team we find so much joy in the knowledge that they create places that will help save lives, discover new cures for debilitating diseases and support treatments for so many people. They are so worthy of these awards.”

BDP also received high commendations for its designs for the Christie Paterson building in Manchester, Wexham Park Hospital in Slough and the Oak Cancer Centre in Sutton. The event was held on the 11th of June 2024 at the Royal College of Physicians in London with more than 250 people from the healthcare industry in attendance.

The European Healthcare Design Awards 2024 celebrate and recognise professional excellence in the design of healthcare environments both in Europe and around the world. The awards attract interest from architects, healthcare leaders, academic researchers, and innovative solutions providers from all over the globe.

Duncan Selbie, former chief executive of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals, said: "Congratulations BDP and the Hospital 3Ts design team on this international recognition; the Royal Sussex County Hospital now enjoys one of the finest acute and major trauma facilities in the NHS benefiting residents and families across Brighton and Sussex for decades to come."

Duane Passman, Former director of Brighton 3Ts project, said: “This project was always ambitious.  I lost count of the times we were told we couldn’t do it:  funding, planning or logistics.  The hurdles placed in our way were too numerous to mention.

“The internal team, the design team and our construction partners proved this wrong. We produced something which has now been recognised as truly extraordinary.  Thanks to BDP and all my colleagues who have worked tirelessly to make this happen.

“We have something which we can all be proud of:  an outstanding hospital building which will treat patients for many generations to come – an incredible legacy for all involved.”