With plans to build 40 hospitals in the UK by 2030 now moving forward, the Royal College of Pysicians has published a report outlining how new hospitals should be designed and planned to improve patient pathways and staff well-being.

Adapted from the RCP’s response to the 2021 Wolfson Economics Prize and aimed at everyone involved in hospital design, the report focuses on how to: design hospital services around the needs of patients rather than the ‘system’; ensure that patients receive better, quicker services from hospitals; and improve staff well-being in hospitals to enable better workforce retention and delivery of services.

The report highlights ways of improving patient pathways that should be built into the functioning of new hospitals, such as continuing to reform outpatients and conducting better ward rounds. It outlines physical changes that are needed, such as co-locating acute admission units. And it points to ways of improving staff well-being, including tackling workforce shortages so staff are less stressed.

The report says that building better patient pathways into the functioning of hospitals does not require radically new ideas, but rather ‘the implementation of what we already know from the huge amount of quality improvement work undertaken by clinicians and other NHS staff’, and pioneering efforts to design and document patient-centred services.