From schooling to sleep, families help shape new Cambridge Children's Hospital
Building work is due to start next year
Families are helping shape what they want the new multi-million pound Cambridge Children's Hospital (CCH) to look like when it's built.
Building work by firm Bouygues UK is set to start next year, as parents have been sharing their views on things from access to education to ward layouts.
"It is a way of having a design that meets the needs of our families that we're catering for, so we can push forward recovery, rehab patients better and get them closer to home," Vicky Amiss-Smith, clinical lead nurse for CCH, said.
"Access to food, schooling, sleep, having single space cubicles where parents have got comfortable beds they can sleep on, all of these additional factors that will make a difference."
'First of its kind'
Once complete, the hospital - backed by at least £100m in Government funding - is due to have 124 hospital beds, including 88 physical health and 36 mental health inpatient facilities across 5,000 square metres.
It will become the East of England's first hospital of its kind, with a full business case set to be submitted by the end of this year before a full opening in 2030.
Children, young people, parents and carers have already been sharing their views around how CCH will look and feel since planning permission was granted in 2022.
"The vision of CCH is to be one of the first of its kind to integrate physical (health), mental health and research into one building," Ms Amiss-Smith said.
"At the moment, services are incredibly fragmented; we are not as efficient for the children, our families and from a workforce perspective as we could be."
'Challenging'
Some of the feedback given to project leaders include meal times, and having enough space for parents and children to eat together to encourage a quicker recovery.
"It's not just an inpatient bed or clinical spaces of preparing medications, but that whole recovery as one," Ms Amiss-Smith added.
"It's been really helpful sometimes challenging when we're asked difficult questions and we're not too sure about the answers, but actually listening to people makes you think who we're doing this for."