Hospice Horizons: Designing Future-Ready Hospice Environments

Key takeaways

• Start earlier than you think. Planning a new hospice takes longer than expected, so understanding your future care model early shapes everything that follows.
• Design around workflow, not individual rooms. Focusing on how staff, patients and families move through the building improved adjacencies, clinical visibility and efficiency at St Elizabeth.
• Co-design with the people who use the building. Families, frontline staff and the Hospice Engagement Group directly shaped the bereavement suite, overnight accommodation, counselling spaces and café.
• Connection to nature matters. Giving every bedroom access to landscaped gardens, and thinking about first and last impressions, creates a non-clinical environment that supports dignity at the end of life.
• Collaborate early to reduce cost and risk. Bringing the hospice, architect, contractor and specialist equipment partner together from the start reduced redesign costs, identified risks sooner and made equipment planning part of the design rather than an afterthought.