The blue sky healthcare health planning process is driven by a need to deliver appropriate clinical services. This is underpinned by the need for the process to face both the patient and clinicians, who are the core stakeholders in any development. Working with the client to establish basic operational requirements, the process is built on the principal of ‘form follows function’. All design decisions are driven from a clinical and operational perspective, with reference to a commercial framework, which delivers value for money, while ensuring appropriate, flexible, future proofed high quality clinical environments that work.

The process is driven by an extensive exemplar room package, which has at its core over 100 exemplar room data sheet sets and 50 exemplar room layouts.

These are used throughout the process to drive the strategy of delivering first the service, then the room adjacencies and finally the departmental adjacencies. The architecture then responds to the needs of the clinical and operational brief, ensuring that it is service delivery, not architectural design, which drives the process.

From the core room data sheet sets, blue sky healthcare have developed 14 3D interactive room environments. The 14 selected rooms are ones which are constantly required to deliver primary health care services. These 14 room exemplars are used from the earliest engagement with stakeholders and allow users to see their clinical spaces before the building is designed. This aids the brief development process and ensures that users get the spaces and combinations of spaces that they need to deliver the appropriate patient services.

The exemplar room package has been developed by blue sky’s team of health planners, architects, engineers and equipment planners with the detailed involvement of our NHS partners, all of whom sign off and regularly review the package’s content. The package is continually reviewed to ensure consistency with current Department of Health guidance, building regulations and best practice, and is therefore continually evolving to respond to current health care needs.

The exemplar package delivers consistency of clinical space, supports the design process and reduces design time. It offers economies of scale through standardisation and reduces the complexity of the construction process, while continually driving down overall project delivery time scales.