The Walton Centre is a specialist hospital providing diagnosis, treatment and care for patients with neurological conditions.

JCA was appointed prior to any design work taking place to assist the health care planners in developing strategies for converting and extending the existing Walton Centre to increase operational capacity. What started as an immediate response to a short term problem became a carefully considered development strategy for conversion and new building. We worked closely with the Trust and clinicians to evaluate the clinical and financial viability of a number of long term goals and establish a phased master plan within which the Walton Centre could develop.

The extensions and reconfiguration of the existing centre have been planned to rationalise the layout, improve the patient and staff environment and provide additional bed capacity, diagnostic services - 2 new MRI scanners - and an additional operating theatre. The inclusion of an inter-operative MRI theatre suite was critical in maintaining the Centre’s position at the forefront of neuro-surgery.

The new build element is the Rehabilitation Centre which provides long term residential inpatient care and ambulatory facilities and a unique pain management programme. It is composed of two wings of differing lengths, held apart by two pavilions, one of which forms the triple height entrance foyer. The residential accommodation is set out on the ground level and creates a private garden to which all the bedrooms have direct access.  All the social spaces within the inpatient unit have terraces that open out onto this space.

We have designed many of the new hospitals with 100% single rooms and are aware of the needs to balance privacy with socialisation, especially for long stay patients. The bedroom suites were developed from the lessons learnt on our previous work on single room design. High levels of borrowed daylight filter into the centre of the plan, eliminating the ‘hotel corridor’ problem from which many single bedroom wards suffer by creating excellent visual links between staff and patients