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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Trauma exposure is a universally recognized significant and consequential public health issue, with estimates that two-thirds of the general population have encountered at least one trauma, and that those exposed are disproportionately over-represented among recipients of health and social services.

There is compelling evidence of the negative neurological, biological, psychological and social impacts of trauma exposure, which may be exacerbated or ameliorated , by environmental conditions.

Trauma informed care is advocated as an evidenced-based best practice approach within contemporary health and social services, with evidence supporting the positive impact of such approaches on the service experience, of both recipient and provider, and on treatment outcomes.

While services have understandably embraced trauma informed approaches with many laudable examples of educational, clinical and service initiatives, the degree to which ‘environment’ has been critically appraised an either an enabler of, or impediment to, service experiences that are authentically trauma informed remains uncertain.

This paper will comprise of two components, the first of which will very briefly present an overview of the underpinning principles of trauma informed approaches., and the second being an interactive exploration of application with a purposeful emphasis on the application of principles to practice through readily achievable environmental enhancements.

Mossley Hill is a new-built, 80-bed in-patient adult acute mental health hospital, located in south Liverpool. The building comprises 4 wards, a S136 suite, an assessment unit, and share therapies provision across. It replaces dated dormitory wards; 3 from an 1980s building which had timetabled garden access, and one from a Victorian Terraced House, both of which were no longer fit for purpose. Nestled in a leafy site in south Liverpool, the hospital features distinctive ward typology to respond to the clinical brief. The design was co-produced with service users and staff, while being mindful of its green, heritage site context. Pioneering measures include multiple gardens per ward to maximise the use of outside space to deliver a calming environment that can be freely accessed; an immersive suite to utilise new technologies for therapies; and technical detailing that supports the Trust’s ‘No Force First’ policy. The building is highly sustainable, with a fully electric energy supply, an extensive photovoltaic array, backed up by excellent U-values in the building fabric. The talk will cover several themes pertinent to mental healthcare design in Ireland: -The design process-how a sense of healing space was delivered and how quality detailing was achieved -How a complex sloping site was addressed in a safe manner for service users - How rising acuities during the project’s development has informed the design - Key project stats for to benchmark -How the funding journey impacted on the project - The project is the fifth latest in a series of new-build projects by Mersey Care, including Aspen Wood, and Hartley Hospital.

Home should be our safe place, but for many people with sensory differences as a result of neurodiversity, this is not the case. Environmental modification as part of Occupational Therapy intervention provides an improved fit between the person, their environment and the occupations the person wants or needs to participate in within that environment. Drawing on Ayres Sensory Integration theory®, this presentation will outline a range of sensory profiles which can significantly affect how a person experiences everyday environments including home; influencing arousal, emotional regulation, distress, and participation in everyday activities. The presentation will explore how understanding sensory profiles can directly inform environmental design resulting in person-centred changes that can improve safety, participation and agency. The presentation will examine the impact of sensory differences for one individual, showing how sensory experiences contributed to increased dysregulation and safety issues, reduced tolerance of the environment, and restricted purposeful occupational engagement with restricted autonomy. Using the Person-Environment-Occupation-Performance Model, the case study will demonstrate how environmental adaptation can be an efficient and least restrictive means of reducing the impact of sensory challenges. Rather than attempting to change the person, the intervention focused on modifying sensory demands within the environment to create conditions that supported regulation, safety and participation. Particular focus is given to co production with the recipient and the builder, as well as the innovative use of the Disabled Facilities Grant to help fund the adaptation. The presentation will highlight outcomes and will demonstrate how occupational therapy perspectives contribute to design by linking sensory understanding with practical environmental change, offering transferable learning for those seeking to create environments that are enabling.

The Regional Communications group in HSE West Northwest identified the need to develop a project group to address the mental health literacy challenges faced within the Traveller community. This project group aimed to co-produce an initiative to empower the Traveller community to improve their mental health literacy thereby strengthening their ability to navigate and engage with the Mental Health Services.
A Steering Group was set up and all relevant stakeholders including Traveller reps from each Traveller organisation were invited to ensure the Traveller voice was heard. However, no Traveller reps came forward and we had to go back to the drawing board.
The phrase "Nothing About Us Without Us"—often adapted in healthcare as "Nothing About Me Without Me"—originated as a rallying cry in the disability rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s, though its roots trace back to 16th-century Polish politics. Following further engagement with the Travellers and Traveller organisations it was agreed what was really needed was a safe space to discuss mental health challenges within the community whilst also incorporating a solution focused approach. The Connect Café model developed by Mental Health Ireland was used to meet with Travellers to discuss the strengths in their community, the challenges with regards mental health and proposed solutions for change. The sessions were facilitated by HSE staff and Peer educators from the Recovery colleges.