Hospital 2.0

The new hospital will enable the transformation of services for patients and the local community – it will significantly improve patient care, experience and outcomes within an ultra-modern environment for the benefit of patients, visitors and staff including:

• Cheaper and faster: Up to 17% more cost effective and up to 25% less time for later schemes against comparative contemporary completed schemes.
• Enhanced patient experience: Patient experience at the forefront, delivering high-quality care and addressing unique patient needs.
• Improved clinical care: Enabling new methods of clinical care, learning from the  pandemic and previous hospital builds to ensure our health infrastructure can adapt to changing health needs.
• Improved workforce wellbeing and efficiency: Ensuring new hospitals are great places to work, designed and operated to enhance employee wellbeing by supporting them to deliver the highest quality care.
• Latest digital technologies: Building on the national vision for digital care, harnessing digital transformation and using the latest technologies to benefit our people and patients.
• Green, sustainable hospitals: Promoting sustainability and ensuring our health  infrastructure is fit for the future, contributing to the net zero carbon vision across the NHS.
• Integration with communities: Integrating with local health and care systems and enhancing local communities and economies.
• Outcome: Driving productivity: The programmatic approach to renewing the NHS estate releases strategic benefits and wider cultural change.

These are the underpinning principles for the Hospital 2.0 design guidelines, with a strong theme of innovation running throughout. 

• Transformational patient care – driving transformation to provide excellent, safe and digitally enabled experience for patients, visitors and staff.
• Hospitals for now and the future – hospitals that are adaptable and resilient to change, that transform national standards and leave a sustainable legacy.
• Optimised healthcare structure – the right estates, the right layout enabling people to be in the right place, supported by intelligent digital systems.
• Built efficiently; operated and maintained to last – using innovation and technology to leverage scale and drive efficiency and value for money. This will ensure maximum durability for the future.

We are not simply replacing like for like. While our new hospital will look and feel very different, we will continue to provide our core services within the new Frimley Park Hospital, on the retained site, and in the community.

Hospital 2.0 is a national, standardised design template for future hospitals which has been designed to benefit our patients and our staff with optimised layout and the latest digital solutions. The blueprint also aims to reduce the overall time to design and build hospitals across the country.

The guidelines have been developed with clinicians across the country, with input from the royal colleges and from patient groups. We are expecting more details on this from the government in summer 2025.

Standard inpatient rooms

The national direction of travel for hospital inpatients is single rooms with direct access to ensuites, to:

• Enhance patient experience through privacy, dignity, confidentiality, and family presence. 
• Improve bed management and utilisation across the organisation. 
• Reduce hospital acquired infections. 
• Provide more acoustic isolation.

Supported by good visibility for staff, latest digital systems and technology, such as fall detection systems.

This will be a big change, however we already have some of our newer wards and extensions adopting this format such as Heatherwood hospital and the new Frimley Park Hospital extension. This has shown better patient experience, improved bed management, brought down hospital acquired infections and provided more noise isolation.

Standard theatres, wards and departments

There will be standard guidelines covering theatres and the vast majority of wards and departments, with template designs to work to. This will mean there is a familiarity from area to area which aims to help staff. 

The inpatient wards have been designed to provide good visibility for both staff and patients and give a modern environment with lots of natural light.

Who has been involved?

The Hospital 2.0 development process has included consultations with patient, workforce and visitor groups, alongside in-house SMEs across all disciplines (clinical, digital, workforce and EFM), models of national best practice, models of international best practice, Royal Colleges, NHS England technical and safety Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). 

The consultations and research were iteratively developed through briefs, drawings, models and mock-ups to produce standard rooms, clusters, and ward development.

The new hospitals will have a focus on sustainability as part of the NHS ambition to reach net zero carbon footprint (the emissions directly controlled by the NHS) by 2040.

The hospitals will also help the NHS target for ‘Carbon Footprint Plus’ (the emissions that the NHS can influence) to reach net zero by 2045.

With modern methods of construction (MMC) buildings, the majority of the build takes place off-site in factory-controlled conditions, before being transported to the hospital site. This speeds up the construction phase, as seen in the new Frimley Park Hospital extension and Slough Community Diagnostic Centre.

This has many advantages – a big one is quality. Ensuring that components are developed off-site in factory conditions to exacting standards. There is also a benefit in terms of construction time.

For the neighbours of our new site, it will also help with the disruption and noise. That does not mean there won’t be any – of course there will be, particularly as the site preparation work begins, but we will ensure this disruption is kept at an absolute minimum. And there will be a lot less drilling through concrete, etc., on site because of this process.

Our new hospital will embrace the latest technology and digital transformation, to provide care in the most efficient environments and optimise opportunities to work differently.

This means we will adopt new ways of working, incorporating the latest medical equipment and handheld technologies, as well as using smart building management systems to manage lighting, temperature, and air quality. 

It will mean change for our patients too, with the opportunity to do more online through our MyFrimleyHealth Record app with regards to bookings and appointments, access to important care information and resources.

Developments in remote monitoring will also have additional benefits for our patients and colleagues.