Improving Hospital Design

Iden Wickings King's Fund, £19.90, pp 76 ISBN 1–85551–072–3

We all want to live on Quality Street. Accessibility, privacy, confidentiality, dignity, choice, comfort, and security are the contemporary objectives in all services, especially health. And now that we take for granted the raw sufficiency of service that technology offers we are ready to trade up to health care that looks bespoke.

Allegedly people dislike the hospitals of the 1960s and 1970s because the service they provide appears - inhospitable. In an effort to put the tenderness into health technology the King's Fund has commissioned research into hospital design. In 1993 it ran a “best new hospital competition,” which was won by the private Wellington Hospital, in St John's Wood, London. Outside, the Wellington is the architectural equivalent …