My £250,000 prize for reimagining the hospital
Governments are no good at innovating, so I want to incentivise the best ideas for improving patient care
In the 2019 election the Government pledged to build 40 new hospitals. £3.7 billion has been earmarked for what, in its words, will be the “biggest hospital-building programme in a generation”. That is great news for the UK’S struggling health infrastructure, but the money alone is not enough. We need new ideas.
Politicians of all colours like to hail “cutting-edge”, “state-of-the-art” and “world-beating” plans; but ambitious one-liners are no substitute for real innovation. And governments alone, outside the exigencies of war, tend to be rather bad at delivering innovation.
That should not be surprising. Innovation flourishes in organisations that encourage experimentation and debate, harnessing the collective intelligence of their colleagues, customers, supplier networks and competition. In the rules-based, riskaverse ecosystem of a government, failures and controversies are to be avoided. It is a tough environment for new, often challenging ideas to flourish.
So how can we bring to the surface all the brilliant ideas out there? How can we ensure that when the Government spends billions on hospitals, we end up with beautiful buildings designed to serve their communities for generations to come? How do we harness the experience of healthcare professionals, architects, engineers, caterers and patients so that they can inform and enhance this building programme? I believe that part of the answer is to have a public debate, stimulated by a prize.
The 2021 Wolfson Economics Prize, which launches today in partnership with the think tank Policy Exchange, asks: “How would you design and plan new hospitals to radically improve patient experiences, clinical outcomes, staff well-being, and integration with wider health and social care?” The prize is free to enter, open to all and the winner will receive £250,000.
Imagine walking into a hospital and feeling reassured – not intimidated or alienated – by your surroundings. Imagine a hospital where clinical efficiency is engineered into the building, and patient comfort, dignity and well-being are at the heart of its design. One in which the relative location of wards, theatres, kitchens, laboratories, offices, cafés and staffrooms, along with the corridors and transport systems that connect them, had been planned to deliver the best possible conditions for employees and patients alike. Imagine a hospital that is an architectural credit to its location, not a blight. This is not just a chance to rebuild our hospitals, or even to redesign them – it is a chance to reimagine what they might achieve.
The prize encourages entrants from all over the world to bring forward ideas on every aspect of the modern hospital. From the aesthetics of the buildings, to the internal logistics, communication, technology, workflow, and hygiene systems driving hospitals on the inside. We are looking for ideas big and small. Where should kitchens be positioned to ensure food can be delivered to every ward while it is hot? How can the flow of people – patients, staff and visitors – be managed around the campus to minimise infection? How can an operating theatre be designed to accommodate technology that surgeons don’t yet use, but will do in the coming decades?
In my own career in retail, I have seen how better planning, innovative design and well-thought-through aesthetics can make or break shops and warehouses. Through the work of my family’s charitable trust I have, in a small way, witnessed how better design can improve the experience and outcome of medical care: how the co-location of researchers, clinicians and patients can lead to better quality research; how increasing the privacy, comfort and efficiency of breast cancer screening centres can lead to faster, more widespread prevention and cure of that disease; and how cystic fibrosis wards, designed specifically to create “a home in a hospital” for the adolescents who spend so much time there, can radically improve the quality of life for those using them.
I know there is a host of brilliant ideas out there and it is my hope that this year’s prize will help to bring them to the fore. Let’s use the opportunity of a once-in-a-generation building programme to build hospitals that can serve us for generations.