Our experience in healthcare and dementia-friendly design gave us a head start when it came to winning this project, a refurbishment of a 14-bed mental health ward at Pyrland House in Taunton, for Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. Pyrland Ward 2 provides assessment and treatment for older people living with dementia and other confused states, with patients staying on the ward for an average of 35 days.
Although only 30 years old, the original building had been through a number of alterations and no longer suited the service being provided. Our brief was to modernise the ward: to bring light to the dark corridors and redecorate throughout; create a larger staff base; provide en-suite facilities to all bedrooms; bring unused rooms back into service and to create a new ‘low stimulus suite’, for patients experiencing high levels of distress.
Rather than adding further extensions, we made the budget stretch as far as possible through a simple, but hard-working, reconfiguration of the existing plan. Unused rooms have been divided to provide en-suite wetrooms and built-in wardrobes to all the bedrooms, without losing space in the rooms themselves.
