Health Building Note 08-02: Dementia-friendly Health and Social Care Environments.

Health Building Note 08-02 was published by the Department of Health in March 2015. It sets out twelve design principles for dementia-friendly health and social care environments, the core design features that deliver them, and case studies from the Dementia Friendly Environments Programme. It is written for designers, estates teams, commissioners and regulators, and for people living with dementia and their advocates.

Signage is one of fourteen core design features, alongside colour, lighting, flooring, doors and others. The NHS pilot projects behind the guidance focused on flooring, colour coding and signage, with particular emphasis on wayfinding in hospitals.

The signage section ties each recommendation to a design principle: clear, legible signs without information overload for safety; high contrast and attention to glare for lighting and contrast; consistent signs across a building for orientation; pictorial and tactile signs at decision points for wayfinding; and signs placed so people can independently find toilets and other basic needs. Sign positions should work for people standing, seated in a wheelchair, and looking from a bed.

It notes that social care settings can take more personalisation than hospitals, and that in clinical settings you may need to avoid duplicating signs for patients and staff on the same door.

For homes rather than care settings, Ireland's equivalent is the NDA's Universal Design Guidelines: Dementia Friendly Dwellings (2015). HBN 08-02 also sits beside the NHS Wayfinding guidance and the HSE Signage Manual: it does not replace either, but adds the cognitive and sensory requirements those documents only touch on.

Where HBN 08-02 and the Building Regulations or BS 8300-2 differ, the statutory baseline still applies; HBN 08-02 is best practice, used by NHS bodies to brief their own projects.

HBN 08-02 is listed in NHS England's index of Health Building Notes, although its NHS England publication page was password protected when we checked. NHS National Services Scotland publishes it as best practice guidance in NHSScotland, with a status note dated August 2016. The document is Crown copyright, reusable (excluding logos) under the Open Government Licence v3.0, so we host a copy of the Department of Health text.