Abstract
Background: Singapore's groundbreaking Woodlands Health Campus showcases how user-centred design and innovative approaches to integrated care can work to transform healthcare delivery, offering valuable insights for practitioners looking to create more responsive, efficient, and patient-centred care models in their own settings.
This health campus opened in December 2023, spanning 7.66 hectares, including a 1,000-bed acute and community hospital, specialist clinics, and a 400-bed long-term care facility with dementia and intergenerational programs. A key feature of the campus is a 1.5-hectare Healing Garden, intended to be both a communal space as well as to deliver nature-based therapies.
Chemistry Team led an extensive human-centred design process over a 3 year period, directly involving Woodlands precinct residents, healthcare practitioners, and local organisations through research, co-creation and testing engagements. This collaborative approach informed the design towards achieving WHC’s aspiration to by a fully integrated healthcare services hub.
This process then allowed the hospital planning team to explore paradigm changing concepts to achieve both functional healthcare system requirements while still aligning with community needs, fostering seamless care transitions, community integration, and enhanced patient experiences through spatial design, innovative use of technology and sustainable design practices.
Audience:
Healthcare practitioners in charge of creating far reaching change and innovation work
Hospital and care centre planners and operations directors and managers
Designers focusing on the healthcare sector
Outcomes: Participants will take away concrete tools and how they can be rigorously applied in their context.
In addition best practices and deep learning from this actual project will be shared giving participants a tangible and useful real life perspective. These include:
- How to deliver rapid and low overhead methods to engage with (very busy) healthcare professionals to gain insights into current challenges.
- How to build new engagement sessions that allow multi-disciplinary teams to unpack complexity and plan out future patient centric journeys, first at a systemic level, and then to translate those into spatial, technological and procedural interventions.
- Pushing the boundaries of prototyping through the process of building a large mockup that depicted key touchpoints in the hospital and provides a mechanism to further engage patients and members of the public in a co-design process.
- Why this approach is significant to help change mindsets and break out of entrenched thinking in a predominantly risk averse domain.
The Woodlands Health Campus has won architecture awards and is currently nominated for the Singapore Presidents Design Award (results to be announced Q2 2025).