what do you mean by public health? like the travelling publlic health nurses?

anyway, i have worked on several hospitals in my former life unfortunately, and the first thing i learned is that you gotta treat the places like hotels. as many beds as possible and efficient; luxury suites for the wealthy and lots of reglar rooms for the joes. then you add the technical layer and things get incedibly complicated really quick. and your done.

huh? people? healing? oh, yeh that happens sometimes...funny how a financial motive can turn hospitals into something quite awful.

just before he passed away my father was in charge of 23 hospitals or so back in canada and he and i would talk about why it was so hard to make really good environments for healing. He would laugh and curse architects for having "concepts" all the time and no way to fund them.

He did however tell me about a paleative care unit he was involved with based on the eden alternative ...i showed it to my old boss but he found it a slightly odd idea, basing long term care on quality of life...but i think that kind of approach is really important, for hospitals in general as well as for nursing homes.

hospitals are still an anomoly to me. how can so many caring people make such uncaring (but safe and functional) places...?

I share your disdain jump. Where did the the people go who "Just want to help people", where I want to investigate is at the chafe where the institution and the public meet and fitting the job of design to the worker and fitting it also to the patient.

I'm reading an article out of the January 2003 edition of Biomedical Scientist where a man named Jonathan Jenkins-Waud gives an overview of Dutch hospital and laboratory services together with some insight onto the working pracitces and and pay conditions of our colleagues overseas.

He gives a rundown of hospital ergonomics, laboratory organization, quality sytems and control--where the physical layout of the laboritories was a problem on the on the strategic and service levels, and other things like the re-evaluation of educationand staffing.

I'm reading now about how the organization of the staffing structure can strenghten heatlh procedures and eventually better patients which is what this is all about ultimately.

Maybe what Koolhaas said in S,M,L,XL is true..."The deeper* a building gets, the more it depends on artiface for its servicing."

there's a book "the architecture of hospitals" published recently in NL.
check this out.
www.naipublishers.nl/architecture/hospitals_e.html

Have you come across Professor Roger Ulrich? He is an environmental psychologist who has carried out extensive research into the aspects of hopspitals thta help patients recover more quickly - access to natural light, views of nature etc.

One example of a large hospital that works quite well is Toronto General Hospital. It uses a large atrium which allows natural light to reach all public areas and patient rooms.

Maggie's Centres (designed by Gehry, Hadid etc.) cancer care in memory of Charles Jencks' late wife Maggie Keswick

Architects for Health (society associated to RIBA)

results for "Hospital" from Informed Design.

Example result from Informed Design:

Author's Title: Healing Spaces: Elements of Environmental Design That Make an Impact on Health

Author(s) Name: Marc Schweitzer, Laura Gilpin, and Susan Frampton

Year of Publication: 2004

Thanks. I appriciate all this, I'm reading through the replies...

Good website with alot of articles:

http://www.healthdesign.org/

Also DEGW, nominally designers / (architect) they focus on the internal/organisational aspects with respect to teaching, office work, hospitals, mostly through space planning.

They they are prolific publishers, particularly John Worthington, Francis (Frank) Duffy, Andrew Harrison.