Gold for North View (Blossom Ward)
Congratulations to North View (Blossom Ward) for achieving a Dementia Design Gold standard award from DSDC!
This development reflects a strong commitment to contemporary, research-informed healthcare design that promotes cognitive accessibility. Its masterplan—centred on a sequence of well-arranged gardens and courtyards—creates an elegant and supportive spatial framework.
The ward exemplifies how design can help people with cognitive impairments regain or maintain independence before returning home. Its communal household model moves beyond traditional institutional layouts, using domestic cues to foster comfort, engagement, and social interaction.
Wayfinding has been sensitively integrated, enabling patients to navigate confidently as spatial orientation becomes more challenging. The approach to privacy, independence, and risk demonstrates a respectful, person-centred ethos.
Creative touches—such as the garden corridor’s “bug hotel”—illustrate the team’s imaginative flair, providing moments of joy and reminiscence that enhance therapeutic value.
In summary, North View – Blossom Ward stands as a model of compassionate, evidence-based design—an environment that feels less like a ward and more like a home: familiar, empowering, and restorative.
North View (Blossom Ward) was audited using DSDC’s Environments for Ageing and Dementia Design Assessment Toolkit (EADDAT), DSDC’s evidence based toolkit to improve environments for our ageing population, and people living with a diagnosis of a dementia.
