With this in mind, the DH design and costing team have launched ‘Inspiring Design Excellence and Achievements’ (IDEAs) This web-based tool is an aid for trusts working with their architects and design consultants to develop their briefs and design ideas for healthcare places.

IDEAs is intended to help create aspirations towards good design from the beginning of the process, and direct attention towards qualities that are often lost in highly technical healthcare environments.

IDEAs has three main elements to help understand “what people do” and therefore “what the design should do” to respond to these needs:

Challenges – what people need to do, their activities;
Considerations – what these challenges mean for design;
Precedents – what others have done
Working with the latest evidence IDEAs starts the design of healthcare places with people – patients staff and visitors – and responds to the emotional and functional requirements of healthcare delivery.

IDEAs treats both interior and exterior “places” where a number of activities commonly take place. It works by understanding these activities and the functional and emotional needs of the people involved.

Examples of activities that people do in healthcare places include arriving, waiting, circulating, consulting /examining, being in bed and so on. IDEAs deals with these activities rather than individual rooms and spaces

IDEAs is intended to be used in conjunction with other design tools such as AEDET Evolution and ASPECT and the website links to information about these tools.


IDEAs is available at http://design.dh.gov.uk/ideas

It is currently under development and new places and functionality will be added to the site over the next few months, so the team would welcome your feedback, using the form available on the site.

IDEAs has been developed with the University of Sheffield School of Architecture.