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Designing Adaptable Healthcare Spaces
How innovative spatial design has helped transform care at a London eye hospital.
13 November 2023
By Professor Grant Mills, Dr Anne Symons, Professor Duncan Wilson and Professor Peter Scully
As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the challenges facing the UK national health service (NHS) multiplied.
In addition to dealing with the immediate effects of the virus, hospitals and clinicians struggled against restrictive measures that slowed routine services – such as ophthalmology – to a crawl.
By 2021, the devastating effects were apparent:
- A 23% reduction in eye test delivery during 2020 – 4.3 million less tests than in 2019
- 235,000 necessary eye surgeries missed or delayed
- 2,986 estimated cases of avoidable blindness and vision loss, purely due to delayed diagnosis and treatment of eye disease
With no more time to waste, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from UCL, including Professor Duncan Wilson from The Bartlett Centre for Spatial Analysis, was commissioned by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to find new ways to reduce the backlog at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.