

Strategic advisory
Where healthcare meets strategy, designing health systems of the future
A growing and ageing population, lifestyle trends, personalised medicine, digital healthcare, and of course responding to a pandemic – all will have an impact on health systems and infrastructure going into the 2020s. The pioneering knowledge of our clinical and health planners can help you design the right solutions to meet these profound challenges in the years ahead.
It’s already clear that future fit hospitals can’t just be bigger hospitals. Trends towards shorter, more effective hospital stays, integrated diagnostic appointments supported by increased community-based rehabilitation, 7-day rotas and telemedicine all impact on the size and configuration of the hospital estate. At the same time, diagnostic advances and digital technologies are opening up many possibilities for interventions in primary and community settings that would have been hospital based until recently.
To help you deliver the right care in the most appropriate and sustainable location, our planners draw on their work across the UK’s NHS and international health systems on intelligent pathways and digitally enabled hospitals as well as designing primary care systems and infrastructure.
We work with you to design the health systems and infrastructure that your citizens need, from strategy through to delivery, wherever you are on the planet.
The Archus approach
We’ve learned that to solve any problems we need to bring integrated thinking. So we cover:
- Strategic health planning – how do geography, demography and epidemiology drive health need and how does that need translate into demand? How can your health system organise itself to deliver not only equity of access but also equity of outcomes? What is the right balance of primary and community care, including care at home, to create the most efficient and responsive care pathway? And finally, how do you plan and size the hospital setting where only the patients who need to be in hospital are there? We bring our long experience and understanding of global best practice to help you answer these difficult questions.
- Clinical planning – what service changes do you need to make? Increased demand, diagnostics and monitoring in the community, or improved utilisation by separating emergency care, elective and post-acute rehabilitation? How can new smartphone technologies help you achieve better and safer monitoring of chronic diseases, such as asthma, heart failure and diabetes, outside of the hospital? We help you balance the benefits and risks involved in achieving the most efficient patient care pathway between GP and hospital care.
- Facility planning – how can your estate and supporting infrastructure adapt to enable clinical changes? How will these facilities be configured to be efficient and what digital infrastructure is needed to support operations? We apply best practice to help solve these challenges: standardising spaces, building in modularity where possible, and creating rooms that can be reconfigured to adapt to change – providing as many as three or four possible uses of the same shell space.
- Masterplanning– what happens when major changes are due to cover a large geographical area or when projects are expected to take several years to implement? Our in-house masterplanning team help clients visualise and communicate a service strategy, and transform into realistic estate solutions; optimising the use of existing facilities and advising on the best locations for new developments. Find out more here.
The right care in a sustainable setting
If patients can be cared for nearer to home they should be, but this is only possible when planning is integrated across health and social care. We draw on our work on national policy and our population-based analytical toolkits to help you develop and deliver whole-system models.
Shaping the next generation of hospital investment
We are involved in the biggest wave of investment in major hospital projects the NHS in England has seen for decades – working on many of the major programmes outlined in the New Hospital Programme (NHP), from Bradford to Birmingham, Crewe to Cornwall. This experience means our advice is sought after on other major health infrastructure projects across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and internationally in countries as diverse as Canada and China – and it gives us valuable insights that you can benefit from too.
Intelligent hospitals and standardisation
Archus is steering future intelligent hospital design. Working with NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE/I), we are developing an approach to standardised, flexible room designs that can accommodate two or three different clinical approaches.
These repeatable inpatient designs keep specialties cohesive but build in flexibility for future changes. Everything from a ward, theatre or consulting room through to telemedicine booths and back office environment can be standardised, vastly cutting design and construction costs. This approach is also key for modern methods of construction at scale. Working with us, you’ll take advantage of our knowledge of clinical practice around the world and how health facility planning and design is evolving.
Digitally enabled hospitals
We’re also developing a model for what a truly digitally enabled hospital can facilitate – and piloting how this could change as good practice and clinical integration develop, and gathering evidence of the system wide benefits. As always, we’re rooted in evidence, not hype.