Colin, whose company Grosvenor Interiors has been working with ACT for three years now looking at ways to transform hospital space, has his own story behind how he started working in healthcare.
His son, Adam, pictured here with Colin, was diagnosed with leukaemia back in 2000 at just 15 years of age.
“He had it for seven years and was in and out of hospital before we lost him. He had to undergo extensive treatment along the way, including a bone marrow transplant, huge rounds of chemo, and lots of MRIs, CT scans and live X-Rays, so I’ve got a lot of experience of what it was like to be treated in hospital and it was obvious to me that the spaces he was in made a huge difference to how he felt.”
“Some spaces Adam went into, he would become more withdrawn or belligerent and in other spaces he was a lot happier going through them if they were decorated in a more age-appropriate way.”
Having started out working in people’s homes, on projects worth thousands of pounds, Colin said after losing Adam he felt the need to work in healthcare and for charities.
“It suddenly didn’t matter how much money we had any more. It was much more rewarding doing work in hospitals where you realise the work you are doing really does make a genuine difference to people, whereas when you do a half a million pound kitchen for people, they cook a nice meal in it and that’s it. Now though, I could spend almost any amount, a couple of thousand pounds, and it can make a huge difference.”
“The NHS is not obliged to provide beautiful looking spaces, but it is well known that the environment is very important to how people feel. Our aim is to calm spaces down and therefore calm the people within them down. As a consequence it reduces anxiety levels, which prevents a stress response in the body and makes the whole process easier for patients being treated as well as for the staff looking after them.”
Colin’s company subscribes to a lot of research papers looking at the impact of environments on healthcare and has its own design department providing the images for the vinyl wraps.
Grosvenor Interiors has just finished wrapping a new state-of-the-art scanner in the MRIS department at Addenbrooke’s using a nature-based forest design – aimed at ‘bringing the outside in.’ In addition to the scanner, the walls of the scanner room have also been wrapped in a forest design, showing images of sunlight bursting through a forest and completely transforming the room
Having seen the wrapped scanner at first hand, Colin said: “For me, it is always a really exciting moment because I am used to seeing it drawn on screen or on a piece of paper. Imagining it and visualising it is never the same as seeing it in the flesh and the scanner was certainly much more impressive than I thought it would be. When I hear the reactions people have, that’s the thing that makes it all worthwhile.”
Colin was delighted to find out that the wrapped scanner was the first in the UK and said: “We are very grateful to Addenbrooke’s and Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust for the opportunity to be involved in the wrapping of the scanner. It is something I have personally wanted to do from the get go after transitioning the business into healthcare. We would very much like to see as many diagnostic machines and scan spaces in hospitals up and down the country with enhanced environments.”
“There is nothing good that comes from your child dying, but realistically I wouldn’t be doing this if that hadn’t have happened. At times it was very hard to find a positive after Adam died, but this is my positive. We have actively made a lot of difference to people’s lives.”
Return to stories