GUM Clinic

Year | 2005

Location | Sheffield, South Yorkshire

Clients | NHS

Based at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital site, the Department of Genito-Urinary Medicine is the main provider of sexual health care for the city of Sheffield. In common with most GU clinics in the UK, the Sheffield clinic has reached capacity. Rates of all sexually transmitted infections are increasing and this trend is set to continue. The current clinic was built in 1981 to accommodate one third of the current patient throughput (currently 13,500 patients per year). In order to comply with the government’s Strategy for Sexual health and HIV waiting time directive, a capacity of 20,000 patients per year is needed by 2008. The clinic has been allocated 384sqm of new space, which has been built on to the back of one of the existing clinic buildings.

The proposal is to produce a strategy for expanding the clinic in a way that best links the new and existing spaces, and that does this in a way that is conducive to a positive experience for both patients and staff. This is planned to be carried out in a three stage development, for which the current funding is £500,000, enough only for stage one. It is hoped that we will gain a further £1.5 million for the final two stages and that a scheme for this complete development can be produced. The client group will consist of mainly clinical staff from the clinic, with hopefully some patient involvement also, in order to gain the insight necessary to strike the balance between a clinic that is open and inviting but that retains a high degree of privacy and confidentiality.

A number of presentations were made to hospital staff on the following:

• Design proposals unique to the GUM clinic at the Hallamshire Hospital.

• More general suggestions to solutions for improving how patients are dealt with by hospital staff in an attempt to make patient and staff experiences more enjoyable.

Credits

Student Team: 

David Baldwin, Amy Cheung, Philip Daniels, Simon Grayson, Alexandra Jones, Basim Shamsuddin, Jeremy Lodge, Kay Robson

Mentor:

Jeremy Till + Cristina Cerulli