The New Atrium at Calderbrook General Hospital

Hospitals have rarely been celebrated for their architecture. For much of the last century, the priority was to fit as many beds and as much equipment as possible onto a site, and the experience of patients and visitors, who often spent hours wandering windowless corridors in search of the right department, was treated as an afterthought. The new atrium at Calderbrook General Hospital, completed last spring, is an attempt to do things differently. Built to replace a confusing warren of extensions that had grown up over sixty years, it gathers the services most visitors need into a single, light-filled space, and early surveys suggest that it has transformed the way people feel about coming to the hospital.

The designers' starting point was the observation that anxious people find it difficult to absorb complicated directions. Their solution was to make the building as legible as possible: from the moment a visitor steps through the Main Entrance, in the centre of the south front, almost every service on the ground floor should be visible. The Atrium itself rises the full height of the building to a glass roof, and its walls are lined with balconies on the upper floors, so that people can see where they are going before they set off. Signs have been kept to a minimum, and each department is identified by a large symbol and a colour that is repeated on the floor, on the doors and on the appointment letters sent to patients, so that even those who struggle to read English can find their way.

Directly ahead of anyone entering, roughly in the middle of the floor, is the information desk, staffed throughout the day by volunteers who can direct visitors, arrange wheelchairs and, when necessary, simply offer reassurance. Its position was the subject of considerable debate. Some staff wanted it placed immediately inside the doors, but the designers argued that a desk set further back would prevent queues from blocking the entrance and allow people a moment to take in the space before asking for help.

The services that visitors use most frequently are grouped closest to the entrance. On the left as one comes in, against the south wall, is the pharmacy, where outpatients collect their prescriptions; its long counter is screened by acoustic panels so that conversations about medication remain private. Facing it across the Atrium is the Shop, which sells newspapers, flowers and the small comforts that patients ask relatives to bring. Further into the building on the western side, beyond the pharmacy, is the Restaurant, which spills out onto the floor of the Atrium in the form of a seating area beneath a row of indoor trees.

The less obvious services lie deeper inside. North of the Restaurant, still on the western side, is the phlebotomy suite, where blood samples are taken; previously scattered across four separate clinics, these are now carried out in a single department that processes more than six hundred patients a day. On the opposite side of the Atrium, immediately north of the Shop, is the discharge lounge, a comfortable room where patients who are well enough to go home can wait for their medicines and transport, freeing their beds for new admissions several hours earlier than before.

Perhaps the most unexpected feature lies in the north-eastern part of the floor, beyond the discharge lounge: a sensory garden, open to the sky, planted with scented herbs and grasses chosen for their texture. It was proposed by a group of nurses working with patients who have dementia, for whom the noise and bustle of a hospital can be deeply distressing, and it has since become a favourite retreat for staff as well. The northern edge of the Atrium is lined with the Stairs and Lifts that serve the wards above, while the corners on either side are occupied by Outpatients, to the north-west, and Radiology, to the north-east. Between the Lifts and Radiology is the multi-faith room, a quiet, simply furnished space available to people of any religion or none.

Inevitably, the building has its critics. Some argue that the money spent on a glass roof and indoor trees would have been better used on clinical equipment. Its defenders reply that the atrium was no more expensive than a conventional design, and that the evidence linking natural light and calm surroundings to faster recovery is now too strong to ignore. Staff, for their part, report fewer complaints from lost and frustrated visitors.