Howells.

I’ve just spent a few hours in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The good and fun reasons for visiting a hospital are few, yet what strikes me as odd is that they use every environmental cue to remind you that you’re there not to have a pleasant time.

Sitting in the waiting room, I gazed around the walls. Every spare inch of every notice board was covered with information-heavy A4 notices that tended to be written in all-caps 48pt Times New Roman or Arial, about all sorts of things: from may kill you to the latest goings on at the hospital knitting club. Every notice was laminated, presumably due to MRSA preventative measure (or maybe to give it a “professional”, glossy sheen, I’m not sure). Then each was pinned haphazardly to the wall, or hung at some awkward angle.

(I’m guessing the nature of the content since no part of me wanted to tackle the information onslaught.)

On one notice board, two pairs of slightly shrivelled balloons were attached to its two top corners, creating disappointing quotation marks around a massive title (created using 700pt all-caps Arial letters printed and laminated on individual A4 sheets). I can’t remember what it said, but imagine four balloons framing the word, “Haemorrhoids” to get a sense of the awkwardness.

I took the snapshot above surreptitiously. It really bugged me that the “Blood Tests” sign is askew, and probably has been for as long as anyone could remember, yet would take a second standing on a chair to fix. Similar signs were strewn around the place without any thought for their clarity. (In fact I heard about four people walking beneath this sign ask how to get to the blood tests department. It was indeed to the left.)

The place is obviously spotlessly clean, yet stationary, magazines, and childrens’ toys are scattered everywhere. The magazines – issues from around the begining of last year – all seemed to have that very well thumbed page curl you find in cheap barbershops.

A simple clean-up and rationalisation of the space would require no additional money to solve, and barely any time. Just a little consideration of the environment from the hospital’s management in consultation with the staff and patients that occupy the space would turn a depressing, imposing space into a far more comforting and informative place to be.

Yet this is the NHS. As wonderful an institution as it is, trying to implement simple changes in the environment would have to be referred to tens of levels of bureaucracy, and probably require some input from an expensive external management or design consultancy. The environment doesn’t need to be “designed”, in the same way you don’t need to design a space to call a home a home. Nor does it need any strategic input or thought; just commonsense. Perhaps all that is required is to imbue the staff responsible for various departments with a sense of pride, ownership and empowerment that presumably has been beaten out of them by the NHS behemoth.

Of course I’m extrapolating from just a few experiences of a handful of hospitals, but fundamentally it’s sad that these tiny problems seem hopelessly simple to solve.