Goodbye St Luke’s, hello Roseberry Park. Health Editor Barry Nelson visits a 21st Century mental health hospital that looks more like a university campus.

A FAMOUS advertising campaign for the Victoria and Albert museum, in London, boasted that it was “An Ace Caff with a Quite Nice Museum Attached”.

The impressive £75m Roseberry Park mental health hospital in Middlesbrough – which opens to patients this week – could almost be described as “An Ace Art Gallery with a Very Nice Hospital Attached”.

The art includes a ravishing series of giant landscapes of local landmark, Roseberry Topping, by the acclaimed photographer, Joe Cornish.

Four of his biggest landscapes flank visitors as they arrive in the streamlined and spacious hospital. More glowing and striking images of North Yorkshire by Mr Cornish are displayed through-out the 312-bed hospital, in Marton Road.

There is also an extraordinary steel ribbon of words, featuring the poetry of Carolyn Jess Cooke, and designed by artist Richard Hollinshead, which snakes through gardens, hallways and courtyards.

And just in case your artistic palate is jaded, there is also a variety of attractive coloured glass in the hospital’s cafe, day rooms and multi-faith area, as well as a range of bespoke – and bizarre – bird boxes on the exterior walls, ranging from what looks like the top of a Roman column to a rugby ball.

A total of 13 artists were commissioned to create what the trust describes as “a series of inspirational and calming pieces of artwork”

for both the interior and exterior spaces. But if the art is impressive, the superlatives start to run out for the hospital itself.

Twenty-five months in the building, Roseberry Park hospital is truly the jewel in the crown of the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.

Replacing the worn-out former asylum of St Luke’s, next door, which had been patched up and up-graded many times in its 110-year life, the new hospital jumps straight from the Victorian era to the 21st Century.

From a distance, with its white walls and brown wooden cladding, it looks more like a university campus than a psychiatric hospital.

And once inside the airy interior, opening out into light-filled rooms and corridors, the visitor can’t help but be impressed.

While the new hospital has fewer beds than the Victorian monster next door – reflecting a big shift in the past few years to care for people in their own homes – patients are in for an experience that will be more like a good hotel than a hospital.

Dr Nick Hand, medical director of the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys Trust, is clearly very proud of the new hospital.

“Our aim was to provide an environment that aids patients’ recovery. The whole design of the building and its surroundings is about providing a lot of light and green space,” says Dr Hand, who spent 16 years treating patients at St Luke’s.

“In terms of the quality of services, the physical environment is really important, and we can be really proud of the physical environment we have here at Roseberry Park.”

The hospital is made up of self-contained wards clustered around landscaped courtyards.

The majority of rooms have en-suite bathrooms and every single bedroom is on the ground floor with a window seat overlooking a courtyard.

“The plan was to provide a quality of accommodation that would not be disappointing if you were checking into a hotel,” says Dr Hand.

All the doors and corridors are wheelchairfriendly, and the rooms are bigger than standard hospital rooms. The hospital also has a range of therapy rooms, a gym, shop and a pharmacy.

Officially, Roseberry Park is a mental health and learning disability hospital providing facilities for adult mental health inpatients, older people with mental health conditions, as well as low and medium secure forensic units (where patients who have had contact with the criminal justice system are treated).

BUILT as part of the Government’s private finance initiative by a consortium led by John Laing, the hospital is a small establishment compared with its predecessor.

Dr Land explains that improvements in the treatment of mental health means that fewer hospital beds are needed.

“We are doing a lot more work with people in the community these days,” he says. “Compared to ten years ago, we can see that there has been a signifcant reduction in the number of beds provided in our hospitals. This has allowed us to make more investment in much better quality care which is provided earlier than it used to be, and at home.

“We work much more effectively by keeping people well in their own homes.”

Dr Hand is also proud of the investment made by the trust in dramatically improving the quality of its hospitals.

“We have spent £150m on modernising our hospitals in the past four years,” he says.

Mental health hospitals have also been built in Darlington and Lanchester, in north-west Durham.

The next project will be the modernisation of Cross Lane Hospital, in Scarborough.