The Practice was appointed to design and deliver a newly built pregnancy and baby loss bereavement centre at Birmingham Women’s Hospital. We worked closely with the Trust and bereaved families to develop a building that provides a calming environment to support families through difficult times.
The stand-alone building, a testament to our commitment to privacy and comfort, directly connects to the Neonatal Unit and Delivery Suite. This connection provides parents with a direct and private route to Woodland House, a dedicated Family Suite for end-of-life care. The shared and private counselling spaces have access to external spaces, providing a sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of the main hospital.
One of the biggest obstacles with this project has been working with a challenging site. To provide level access for the users directly from the Neonatal and Delivery wards, we’ve had to plan for significant excavation works and surrounding landscaping works to achieve these requirements.
The shape of the site is also oblique, narrow and long which has dictated the form of the building. However, we’ve still aimed to retain the organic curves and the central courtyard as originally proposed when the building was going to be located close to the front of Birmingham Women’s Hospital.
Ensuring that the building maintains these features has been imperative in optimising patient and staff flow around the building.
Overcoming these hurdles has meant we’ve created a private, secure and calm environment with an external space at the heart of the building.
"We have and continue to have a good relationship with PHD. The support they have offered to us with several projects have meant that we have been able to produce projects, in line with the briefs issued. Recently PHD have worked hard, helping to deliver a Bereavement Centre at the Birmingham Women’s hospital. This project has been very testing, both emotionally and physically. Countless meetings, often out of hours with Bereaved families, capturing the brief and ensuring it is interpreted properly and the vision added to the scope. I look forward to working with PHD in the future."
"We have had the pleasure of working with phd architects on a very special project over the past 5 years. Woodland House is a therapeutic space where families who are going through pregnancy loss, or the death of a baby can receive some of the non-clinical care that they need. This space is the first of its kind in the UK, and sets the standard for the environment in which these families and their babies should be cared for in. Every step of the project was taken with a wonderful team of bereaved families, who shaped the spaces and provided their advice and views, true collaboration between architects, clinicians, & estates. The team at phd really engaged with this integrated process, getting to know the families, and providing some brilliant solutions, and beautiful designs. The parents we worked with have fed back they really felt listened to and could see where the team had incorporated their views."
