Description

Acute hospital designed to provide a healing environment, promoting patient and staff wellness.

The masterplan for Sunshine Coast University Hospital (SCUH) encompasses a 450 overnight bed public tertiary level teaching hospital, with future expansion to 750 overnight beds, that will provide a full range of ambulatory and acute services alongside an academic and research centre. The challenge for the masterplan was to combine staged public and private sector hospitals and integrate two existing hospitals in neighbouring towns within a new urban centre, yet to be built on re-claimed marshland.

Identity, patient care and place making are integral to the SCUH vision. The objective of the masterplan is to promote good civic design, flexibility and accessibility. It considers the basic architectural structure and organisation of space as the foundation for a healing environment. As part of the PPP consortium, BVN defined a flexible masterplan which could accommodate the development of multiple major facilities on a single site and developed a design of the major acute facility through a series of salutogenic principles.

One of the key challenges for this project was to accommodate all the different facilities in a staged development. The solution allocates space in a flexible open-ended structure that responds to the constraints of the site and allows for growth and change over the lifetime of the facility. The accommodation is divided into modules that combine into flexible formations to meet the needs of each generation of users.