Architecture+Design Scotland

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Getting the most out of healthcare development starts a long time before even the breifing stage - it starts at the point we set strategies for the development of our communities and decide where new homes might be and how they will be linked and served. Often new health facilities are criticised for being in the wrong place, but they can only be where there is land available close(ish) to the population they need to serve. Therefore how we plan community development directly impacts how effectively we can plan the healthcare estate needed to support that developing community.We've been working at this interface, seeing how city planning and service planning can work better together.

We've just published a study linking the two together. Using Inverness as an example, this paper models the potential effect on the number and nature of healthcare facilities required to serve the changing City. The study looks at the changing strategies for healthcare provision, the potential infrastructure needed to support this and how that might map onto three ‘city scenarios’ considered during the City Visioning and Local Development Plan process, to help understand the impact on pub…

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“....so which takes precedence, the momentary view of a historic monument from a road junction or the view from the window of a child’s hospital room?”....apparently, for some, this is a difficult choice....

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The authorship of a building, unlike that of a novel, isn't the work of a single soul: it owes as much to the imagination of the client as the penmanship of the design hand. However each has the role of the author as described by novelist John Irving, paraphrased as "to strengthen weak hearts and soften hard hearts".

For clients it is in leading sometimes nervous people to develop and hold to a visionary brief; for architects it's designing an environment which will effect just that change in the people who inhabit it. 

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