This introductory session aims to frontline healthcare workers with practical design thinking skills that can be applied immediately in everyday clinical practice. Design thinking is a human-centred approach to problem-solving that focuses on understanding the needs, experiences, and challenges of the people who use healthcare services, including patients, families, and staff. Participants will be introduced to the core principles of design thinking, including empathy, problem framing, ideation, prototyping, and testing. The session is designed for healthcare professionals with little or no prior experience in design methods. It will demonstrate how design thinking can strengthen existing approaches to audit, quality improvement, service development, innovation, and research by ensuring that solutions are grounded in the real experiences of those affected by them. Participants will explore practical tools that can be used to gather insights, engage stakeholders, and test ideas before investing significant time and resources. Healthcare is better with design because it places people at the centre of decision-making. By understanding what matters most to patients and staff, healthcare teams can create services that are more effective, accessible, acceptable, and sustainable. Human-centred design helps bridge the gap between identifying problems and implementing meaningful change, ultimately improving patient outcomes, staff experience, and the quality of care delivered across healthcare settings.

Digital technology is rapidly reshaping mental health environments from electronic locking and ligature-detection systems to data-driven monitoring and patient-facing tools. These advances present enormous potential to improve patient experience, dignity and safety. But if poorly implemented, they can also introduce new risks: alarm fatigue, privacy breaches, power imbalances, and a shift away from therapeutic human interaction. In this session, Philip Ross will share Safehinge Primera's unique             perspective from 15 years of innovation across high-acuity and acute mental health settings. Drawing on lessons from two generations of electronic locking, real-world feedback from lived-experience groups, and case studies from NHS services and high secure environments, the presentation explores where technology genuinely helps and where it unintentionally harms.

This presentation explores how the Children's Health Ireland (CHI) Innovation team applies human-centred design and co-production to improve paediatric healthcare environments, with a particular focus on neurodiversity-informed design and inclusive care. Working across outpatient (OPD), emergency (ED), and general paediatric services, our team collaborates with young people, families, and multidisciplinary clinical teams including psychology, nursing, and phlebotomy to better understand lived experiences of care. Through structured engagement methods such as workshops, service mapping, and iterative prototyping, we uncover insights that challenge assumptions and reveal unmet needs across physical, digital, and service touchpoints. Our approach emphasises building a shared understanding of healthcare journeys from multiple perspectives. We recognise that experiences of environments and services differ significantly between clinicians, patients, families, and administrative teams. By mapping these perspectives, we identify opportunities to create safer, more therapeutic, and more accessible environments. The presentation will highlight key principles of our work, including co-production, inclusivity, and evidence-informed design, alongside case studies demonstrating practical outcomes. These include projects spanning environmental adaptations, communication tools, digital solutions, and emerging technologies such as augmented reality and AI integration. Particular attention will be given to designing for neurodivergent and neurotypical users, ensuring environments support sensory regulation, reduce anxiety, and promote positive healthcare experiences. Aligned strongly with the DHEI themes of Co-production and Therapeutic Environments, this session offers practical insights into how collaborative design can deliver meaningful improvements within public healthcare settings.

Across time and culture, from the earliest teachings of Hippocrates, the role of ‘environment’ as a contextual factor of healing has been both foundational and explicit. Despite this enlightened heritage, ‘environment’, and its design, frequently exists below the level of conscious awareness among key decision makers, with perception of environment often limited to functional ‘places’ of intervention.

Growing attention to ‘environment’ and its design presents an opportunity for fostering a deeper understanding of ‘environment’ as being integral to the quality of the service experience for both recipient and provider [staff], and a key enabler of service user satisfaction and treatment outcomes.

This shift reflects the emerging recognition of the synergy between physical, psychological, and social factors which contribute to co-creating health environments as supportive places of healing, in which every contact counts. The shift is supported by the growing body of research evidence, demonstrating the contribution of environmental factors in enhancing service user satisfaction, the work experience of staff, and improved treatment outcomes.

This paper will present a broadened view, [the perceptual shift], of ‘environment’ within a health and social care context and broaden the perspectives through which it's effectiveness is considered. While drawing upon empirical evidence, emphasis will be placed on practical application of theory to practice.

I trained in St Ita’s, Portrane and St Brendan’s, Grangegorman. I have watched Ireland move on from those buildings, yet too many people in mental health crisis still meet a system that fails to offer the right support at the right time. Today that often looks like a chair in a noisy waiting or in a corridor of a busy emergency department, in an environment designed for everything except a mental health crisis. I have worked in liaison psychiatry and know the system well. In April 2025, the Mental Health Commission published its national survey of acute mental healthcare in Irish EDs. It found a “poverty of appropriate space” across most emergency departments, substantial assessment delays, and prolonged inappropriate placement of children. An estimated 51,000 people access mental health services for the first time through an Irish ED each year. Sharing the Vision (Implementation Plan 2025–27) commits to therapeutic alternatives. The need is acknowledged but the model is not yet built. Since 2016, Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment and Healing (EmPATH) units, developed by Dr Scott Zeller, have been transforming crisis care across more than sixty US sites. Recliners replace trolleys and open, naturally lit spaces replace locked cubicles. Peer specialists work alongside multidisciplinary teams. Peer-reviewed outcomes from a Midwestern academic medical centre showed psychiatric admissions fell from 57% to 27%, ED boarding time reduced by approximately two-thirds, and 30-day follow-up engagement rose by 60% (Kim et al., Academic Emergency Medicine, 2022). Restraint use is consistently reported under 1%. Adolescent and paediatric variants are emerging, including a recent $45.5 million state-funded expansion across 13 South Carolina hospitals.

The "Virtual Reality for Exposure Therapy" (VRET) initiative at St Patrick’s Mental Health Services (SPMHS) represents a nursing innovation designed to enhance anxiety treatment. Originating from a ward-floor idea by Staff Nurse Aine Whyte—winner of the 2022 St Patricks Nursing Innovative Project Award—the concept was developed by a dedicated Nursing Quality Initiative working group in 2024.
The project introduces VRET into the anxiety disorders programme at St Patrick’s University Hospital as a cutting-edge, supplementary intervention. By utilising immersive software (XR Health), the project provides tailored, controlled, and scalable exposure environments for service users facing complex phobias and anxiety triggers. This initiative targets both inpatients and outpatients diagnosed with Agoraphobia, with or without Panic.
To evaluate efficacy, the project establishes a structured pilot programme involving 10 participating service users. A comparative analysis was conducted post-assessment on clinical outcomes against a 2022 baseline control group of 10 service users who underwent traditional exposure therapy. The outcomes proved that virtual reality was an effective treatment method and improved service user outcomes.

This presentation describes the development of Ireland’s first National Mental Health Experience Survey (NMHES). The NMHES asks people discharged from acute inpatient mental health units and hospitals about their experiences of care to identify areas of good experience and where improvements can be made.
People with lived experience of mental health services, health and social care professionals, advocacy representatives, policy makers, and academic experts participated in developing the questionnaire. This helped to ensure that the content, language, and topics reflect the aspects of care and the environment that matter to those using the services, while generating meaningful and actionable data.
The questionnaire follows the pathway of care including; admission, care in the mental health unit or hospital, discharge and follow-up care. It asks about the accommodation while in inpatient care, privacy, support with physical health needs, choice in social and recreational activities, interactions with staff, involvement of family, friends and carers as well as whether the facility met their needs.
The NMHES is one of seven programmes of engagement undertaken by the National Care Experience Programme (NCEP). These have informed improvements in the design of healthcare environments such as postnatal hubs for new mothers and private rooms at end of life. The presentation outlines how other NCEP programmes have informed the built environment in other care settings.

Discussing the successful delivery of a new perinatal mother and baby inpatient unit, highlighting how co production, experts by experience and person centred design were central to achieving a safe, appropriate and effective therapeutic environment. How design of Perinatal spaces necessitates a balanced approach to risk and the importance of placemaking. Key focus on the benefits of adapting/repurposing an underutilised asset within an active health campus and reflecting on the delivery challenges of operational constraints on a busy clinical site. Approximately 1 in 4 women will have a mental health problem during pregnancy and/or in the first year after birth and up to 4 in 1000 of these women will require an admission to a Mother and Baby Unit (MBU). MBUs are specialist inpatient units for women with severe mental health problems in the perinatal period where they can be admitted with their baby. Mental illness at this crucial time can affect a mother’s relationship with her baby. It can undermine a woman’s confidence and belief in her ability to be a good mother. MBUs are designed to keep mothers and their babies together. Specialist staff nurture and support the mother infant relationship on the ward at the same time as the mother has treatment for her mental illness. Women who require an MBU admission often have to go far away from their home and support network due to the limited number of units in the UK. Seren Lodge will give the women and families of Cheshire, Merseyside and North Wales access to their own specialist provision.

This presentation explores how sensory-informed design was embedded throughout the development of an inpatient mental health unit in rural England, which was awarded Design in Mental Health Project of the Year 2026. Using a real-world case study, it demonstrates how considerations such as colour, light, layout, acoustics, materials and access to nature can be used to create environments that feel calm, safe and therapeutic.

The session will share practical examples, lessons learned and key outcomes from the project, showing how sensory-informed design can be successfully delivered within the realities of healthcare design and construction. Delegates will gain practical, transferable insights that can be applied to mental health, autism, learning disability and wider healthcare settings.

Across Europe, healthcare systems balance standardisation and flexibility in different ways. This presentation compares approaches to mental health facility planning in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Sweden, examining how governance structures influence design outcomes, innovation, therapeutic quality, and project delivery. The UK and Ireland increasingly rely on nationally coordinated guidance frameworks such as Health Building Notes (HBNs), Health Technical Memoranda (HTMs), alongside the emerging platform based systems such as the NHS New Hospital Programme's Hospital 2.0, and the HSE Standardising Healthcare Accommodation programme. These initiatives aim to improve consistency, safety, efficiency, and scalability across healthcare estates. In contrast, Sweden operates a more decentralised model in which evidence-based guidance and room standards are used as adaptable starting points rather than fixed requirements. Planning solutions are developed through regional interpretation, stakeholder dialogue, and project-specific adaptation. Using contemporary mental health facilities as case studies, including Cambridge Children's Hospital in the UK and SÄS psychiatric clinic in Borås, the presentation explores how different governance cultures influence planning typologies, therapeutic environments, patient rooms, and relationships to landscape. The findings suggest that the key distinction lies not in the existence of standards themselves, but in how they are interpreted, negotiated, and implemented throughout project delivery. While standardisation can support consistency, operational reliability, and scalable delivery, flexibility can create opportunities for contextual adaptation, therapeutic quality, and innovation. The presentation concludes by reflecting on emerging platform-based healthcare delivery models and asks whether future healthcare planning may require hybrid approaches that combine repeatable technical systems with adaptability and human-centr