We are thrilled that our exemplary design for the Pears Maudsley Centre for Children & Young People has been so comprehensively recognised. Thanks to highly committed partnership-working between the Trust, the Maudsley Charity, King’s College London and their expert design team, the centre will make a major contribution to the treatment and recovery of young people suffering with mental health issues. Every stakeholder involved in this complex project deserves a major round of applause
Graham Harris
18 June 2021
Pears Maudsley Centre for Children & Young People highly commended in major European design award
Designs for the centre, set to open in Denmark Hill in 2023, were highly commended in the future healthcare design category at the European Healthcare Design Awards.
Architect Graham Harris and his team at IBI Group were highly commended in the future healthcare design category at the European Healthcare Design Awards for their work on the Pears Maudsley Centre for Children & Young People, which is set to open in Denmark Hill in 2023.
The building will house modern inpatient, outpatient and crisis mental health care facilities for children and young people, as well as state of the art clinical research facilities. It will bring together clinicians from the UK’s largest NHS provider of specialist child and adolescent mental health services to work with the largest group of mental health scientists and clinical academics in Europe.
Clinicians from South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and researchers from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) will work alongside each other to develop new ways of addressing the mental health and wellbeing challenges facing children and young people today.
Mr Harris and his colleagues talked with service users, parents and carers while designing the building to ensure they influenced the design of the new centre.
Service user input and IBI’s own approach ensured that access to nature was built into the design of the centre. The building will have landscaped outdoor terraces with extensive planting on each of the building’s eight floors – capped by a roof terrace. It is hoped this will provide the calming, relaxing spaces difficult to achieve in a traditional inner-city hospital building.
Stakeholders from King's, SLaM and the Maudsley Charity welcomed the recognition of the quality of the centre’s design.
The opportunities to accelerate research progress and clinical translation afforded by the co-location of researchers and clinicians in the Centre is enormous. The children, young people and families attending our services are keen to participate in research that will improve outcomes and the facilities in the new Centre will allow us to increase the volume of cutting-edge research. By developing research projects with our clinical colleagues and the children and young people we see in our services, we are confident we will be addressing the scientific questions most likely to produce meaningful benefits for children and young people
Professor Emily Simonoff, Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at King’s College London
We are confident that the centre will provide world-leading clinical care and host exceptional research around the mental health of our children and young people. However, with our Trust serving four diverse south London boroughs, with significant levels of deprivation, we are determined that the centre will not just build on our international reputation for CAMHS innovation and treatment. The centre’s work will drive positive changes in the mental health problems affecting our communities – including those we serve most closely. It is gratifying to know this work will take place in an environment which will support us in that endeavour and we congratulate Graham and his colleagues
Dr Bruce Clark, Clinical director for child and adolescent mental health services at SLaM
We are delighted with this recognition for the building that, together with our generous donors, we have helped to fund. With our breaking ground ceremony taking place shortly this recognition provides a boost to everyone committed the mental wellbeing of our children and young people and early and effective treatment
Rebecca Gray, chief executive, Maudsley Charity
The European Healthcare Awards are organised by Architects for Health and SALUS Global Knowledge Exchange and the results were announced at the European Healthcare Design 2021 Congress & Exhibition on 17 June 2021.
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Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry