Hopewood Designed with mental health in mind
A project to construct Hopewood – a brand new, purpose built campus-style mental health care ‘hub’ providing specialist services and support for children, young people and their families and for perinatal mothers and babies – is making good progress on site in Mansfield Road, Nottingham.
The site, formerly known as The Cedars Rehabilitation Unit, is ideally set within green open spaces, enhancing the therapeutic and caring environment.
The project is being carried out for Nottinghamshire Healthcare by main contractors Kier. The works commenced with the demolition of existing buildings on site in May 2016, and is due for completion in April 2018.
The development will include new inpatient and outpatient facilities for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), a new Mother and Baby Unit, and outpatient facilities for Perinatal Mental Health Services. There will also be a specialist eight-bedded Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit on site – a facility not previously available in the East Midlands.
Across the country there is an alarming shortage of child and adolescent mental health care beds, and this new build should remove the need for so many young people to be treated out of the area.
David Pipes, capital services manager at Nottinghamshire Healthcare said: “We were looking to relocate two of our existing facilities to the new Hopewood Centre. One of these is a 12-bed adolescent mental health unit for children and young people. The original unit has become dated – and we also wanted to increase the bed capacity to 32, and to provide new services for psychiatric intensive care, eating disorders and adolescent general mental health conditions.
“We also wanted to relocate and replace our existing six-bed mother and baby perinatal unit with a new eight-bedded facility at Hopewood.
“A third new facility to house a daycare centre for children and young people and the community mental healthcare teams is also being created.”
One of the main challenges of the project has been that the design work for the new facilities is fairly bespoke – meaning that there are not many similar models to follow. Another major challenge is the sloping nature of the site, which is on three levels and necessitated the construction of retaining wall structures and related engineering enabling works – plus the installation of rainwater attenuation tanks.
There is a severe lack of young people’s mental health services across the country, so occasionally patients had to go far afield from Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands to access these. The new development will make it much easier for those needing a local service.
David Pipes concluded: “Personally the project is very important to me, as nothing on a similar scale has been constructed for a long time, and this scheme will greatly benefit the local community.”
The works are currently progressing on time and on schedule.
The development is part of ‘One Door Many Pathways’, the Trust’s five-year strategy for children, young people and families. The new developments within child and adolescent mental health services are part of a wider programme which the Trust is implementing to improve these services.
A key part of this programme is a new integrated model of care which will provide more seamless care and improve how people access services.
