Designing the primary health care centre of the future: a community experience

The purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the process undertaken by Capital Health responsible for planning and developing a new primary care centre in an older urban, and demographically mixed neighbourhood in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The approach to the paper is to describe how health centres, if they are to be fully effective in terms of meeting community needs, need more than technical excellence; they also need to fit into the community where they are to be located. Primary care centres, through helping people stay healthy and manage their own health in their own communities, can be an essential antidote to the challenges presented by an aging population. The paper uses the Capital Health initiative as a means of demonstrating how a primary care centre can achieve this objective, in terms of design and physical location, as well as planning process.

The paper describes the process the project planners have developed to enter into dialogue with representatives of the community. The proposed site selected for the clinic was met with some resistance because it was formerly a school built in the 1930s in the middle of a large area of green space and surrounded by mature elms in the midst of a mixed urban residential area. Through an intense two-way communication process with residents of the area, the plans for the centre are iterative, evolving in such a way that the clinic will not only integrate architecturally and structurally, but better meet the needs of the community it serves.

The paper has practical implications for anyone interested in designing and locating new health centres in already existing urban communities.

Discusses the issues of building a new primary care centre, while preserving precious green space and considering opinions of local residents.