by the Hospital Senses Collective

In 1955, the Nuffield Trust mapped how different hospital layouts changed the movement of nurses between wards, corridors, and non-clinical spaces. These motion studies offer another historical source from the early NHS. We present them as a prompt to consider how changes over time to ward layouts and hospital floor plans have affected the ways that people move through space. These images highlight the diversity of experiences within any hospital space, and the importance of architecture, design, layout and space in the making of embodied experience. Medical staff have rarely ever been stationary. Their sensory experiences, unlike those of a bed-bound patient, are mobile and constantly in flux. In turn, as the hospital space requires staff to move around it in new ways, their working patterns change the sensory atmosphere of the ward for other occupants. 

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