On this page:
Space for Health offers access to UK healthcare premises best practice guidance. It allows you to navigate by healthcare topic or engineering speciality. Recommended schedules of accommodation for each of the clinical services covered, will also be made available. Guidance is presented as fully searchable ’manuals‘. Ready-to-print pdfs of the manuals are available at the click of a button.
There are four main parts to the website:
- Clinical services
- Healthcare environment
- Spaces and costs
- Publications
Clinical services
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Section ID : 7203
The information in ‘Clinical services’ is derived from the Health Building Note series of publications. The information is divided into clinical service topics, such as ‘Accident and Emergency’ or ‘Cancer services’.
Please note that any ‘Clinical services’ guidance needs to be read alongside ‘General design principles’ and ‘General engineering principles’ in ‘Healthcare environment’.
Healthcare environment
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Section ID : 7204
'Healthcare environment' topics set healthcare-specific standards for the design and operation of engineering services, such as medical gas installations and fire safety requirements. They also set healthcare-specific standards for building components, for example sanitaryware.
The information in 'Healthcare environment' is derived from the Health Technical Memorandum series of publications, plus elements of design solutions from the Health Building Notes and Scottish Health Planning Notes series that are not unique to a single clinical specialty.
Spaces and costs
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Section ID : 7244
The Spaces and costs section contains Costing guidance and Generic spaces.
Healthcare Premises Costs Guides (HCPGs) provide a cost per square metre for building and engineering services for different hospital departments in England. Cost guides for each specialty are produced as an overall cost/m² and based on a new zoning approach into public, staff and clinical zones.
Generic spaces give example room layouts, together with supporting ergonomic information.
Publications
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Section ID : 7208
The Publications catalogue contains pdfs of the UK Health Organisations' publications. You can search the catalogue by category, including health topic or series, or by title or keyword. Each publication comes with a brief summary and useful information, such as a publication date. The catalogue will signpost you to new editions or related titles. You can also download full pdfs of the documents that meet your search criteria, and in many cases you can order hard-copy print copies also.
About manuals
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Section ID : 7234
A 'manual' is simply the web version of a guidance document. Manuals are found inside topic pages. Topics are categorised on Space for Health according to their contents. For example, maternity care facilities guidance can be found under the 'Clinical services' tab, while technical guidance on acoustics can be found under the 'Healthcare environment' tab.
Links to manuals look like this:
Some guidance documents are split into two manuals: a ‘Policy and service context manual’ and a ‘Planning and design manual’ (with two links, as shown above).
- Policy and service context manual: explains the link between clinical policy and the physical environment, and provides background information on the care pathway and accepted models of care.
- Planning and design manual: informed by the policy manual, this includes the scope of functional content; functional relationships; planning and design considerations; spaces (including room layouts); and engineering considerations. It also identifies the associated schedules of accommodation and costing information.
Once opened, a manual looks like this (right):
To the left of the manual is the ‘manual contents’ panel. The main content items are visible on opening the manual, and these can be expanded by clicking on them.
The logo on the top right of the page will indicate which country the manual applies in.
Photographs and diagrams within the manual are mostly at thumbnail size. They can be enlarged by clicking on them. Please note: you need to enable pop-ups on your internet browser (i.e Internet Explorer or Firefox) to use this function.
At the bottom of the ‘Manual contents’ is a ‘Version history’ link. This can be used to see all the previous versions of the manual you are viewing.
All of manuals contain a date and a version number for audit purposes.
Collect for pdf
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Section ID : 8574
Collecting for pdf is easy, all you need to do is go to any manual on the website and click on 'save manual content and topic links to pdf file'.
Each pdf has its own unique version number and date, so you can be sure of exactly which version you're referring to. For instance the manual below Maternity care facilities: Policy and service context manual' is manual number 39 and version number 0.7. If a significant change is made to the manual it will receive a new version number.
Please note: these numbers may vary between manuals, as some of our development work on the website has led to extra versions being created.
Inside the contents page, each article and section also has its own version number.
If you start to use 'collect for pdf' and need any further information email help@spaceforhealth.net.
