Community Nursing Units PPP

The Community Nursing Units programme is the first social-infrastructure PPP of its kind in Ireland: seven residential care units for older people, 530 beds in total, procured by the HSE with the National Development Finance Agency and delivered by the Equisisk consortium, a joint venture of Equitix and John Sisk & Son, under a 25-year design, build, finance and maintain contract. We did the wayfinding for all seven.

Thomastown holds 95 beds and Killarney 130. St Finbarr's in Cork holds 105. Ardee, Athlone, Clonmel and Midleton hold 50 each, arranged as two 25-bed households rather than one ward.

These units were built because older HSE care stock could no longer meet HIQA's national standards for residential care. That origin shapes everything downstream. The standards are not a design preference to be interpreted; they are the reason the buildings were commissioned, and signage is one of the things inspected against them.

A single building is a design problem. Seven buildings on one contract is a different problem, and it is the one we are built for. The system is resolved once, against the household plan the programme repeats, and then released to each site. Every unit reads the same way, so a staff member who transfers between them is not learning a new building, and the HSE inherits one standard rather than seven interpretations.

Designed once, certified once, installed seven times. That is the whole argument for a specialist.

The construction programme matched that logic: modern methods of construction with off-site precast superstructures, on a 104-week build. A repeatable building wants a repeatable sign system, and the two have to be specified to the same drawing set rather than bolted together at the end.

03Designing for the resident, not the visitor

Most wayfinding assumes a stranger who will learn the building. In a nursing unit the opposite is true: the people reading the signs live there, some with dementia, and the building has to stay legible on a difficult day as well as a good one. That changes what the signage is for. It is less about directing someone to a destination and more about confirming, continuously and without effort, where you are and which door is yours.

The household model helps, because 25 residents in a defined group with its own dayroom, dining and sunroom is a smaller world to hold in your head than a corridor of fifty. Contrast, letter height and consistent placement do the rest, and all of it sits alongside the bilingual Irish and English provision the HSE carries as a public body.

Each unit names itself on arrival with Irish set above English: Aonad Altranais Pobail Lóiste Ferdia over Ferdia Lodge Community Nursing Unit, Ionad Cúraim Chónaithe Bhaile Mhic Andáin over Thomastown Residential Care Centre. The totem takes its curved profile from the HSE mark it carries, so the sign reads as the health service before it reads as the building. For someone arriving at a service they were referred to rather than a place they know, that is the right order.

The same discipline runs all the way down to the door. Cúraim Lae / Day Centre at the gate, Fáiltiú / Entrance under the canopy, Bealach Isteach / Áit Feithimh along the corridor, and tactile room plates set at a consistent height beside the handrail, where a resident's hand already is.