The hospital of the future

Norman Foster, the man whose practice brought us the Gherkin, Beijing Airport, and the Great Court at the British Museum has until now had nothing to do with healthcare.

That has all changed, however, as his first hospital opens amid bold claims that it has reinvented what a hospital can look like.

Situated on the outskirts of Bath, the glass and metal box sits on the edge of a business park and suggests that it might be a trendy headquarters for a computer firm or even perhaps an art gallery.

Inside, it certainly feels more like a posh hotel lobby than a typical NHS waiting room and reception.

Instead of disinfectant it is the smell of coffee and leather seating that greets you. The view through the plate glass windows is of the green fields outside Bath.

The forest of signs that normally greets you at the entrance to a hospital is replaced with people to guide you to the right place. Equipment is hidden away. Everything is designed to calm you.

Upstairs, each patient who stays in overnight has their own room with a view. The floor is made of oak. The windowsill has a herbarium. Downstairs even the operating theatre has a view of the countryside.

Painful costs

Of course, Circle Bath is a private hospital but one that will offer operations to NHS patients at the fixed NHS rate. It is claimed that it was built for roughly the same as any comparable modern hospital.

The ideas though are not new. Increasingly, research is beginning to show that we get better quicker if we recuperate in calm environments with natural light.

The surgeons here say that the calmer the patient the less anaesthetic they have to use, the faster people are back on their feet. It raises productivity.

It is an agenda that has been championed by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, CABE.

Some such as the new childrens' wing at Moorfields, Newton Abbot's Community Hospital and the Norfolk and Norwich have all won praise for introducing light and cheer.

But other products of the £12bn hospital programme have not been praised so highly.

The minister responsible for architecture, Margaret Hodge, spoke last year about the dark rooms and miles of corridors of the new Queens building in Romford.

CABE says there is a long way to go to truly make most of our hospitals welcoming and attractive places to be.

The problem is that healthcare is far more complex than an art gallery or other prestige architectural projects.

Each building has hundreds of activities that change rapidly over time. Familiar solutions are repeated rather than risk tens of millions on new ideas.

Clinical demands are the priority over beauty or natural light and it is rare for an architect new to the field to be given a remit to experiment.

Circle Bath, though, is a new venture and a co-operative of local clinicians. Clinical demands for a clinical atmosphere have to be married with the need to attract patients.

As a consequence the scheme has borrowed heavily from modern hotel design to try to create an atmosphere we want to be in, more health spa than health factory.

The economics is driven by the fact that they can choose which services to provide - this is a place for knees and cataracts, high volume, straight forward day care.

But by making it a beautiful building they hope it will bring in the customers and will speed their passage through the system. Good design, they hope, pays for itself.