Architects are trained to design buildings and the subjective perception of building users may not be easy to translate into a designer's language. In the UK, the design profession has not fully appreciated the significance of returning to the erected structure to appraise how well it was, and remained, fit for purpose. This paper presents a critique of the state of the art of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) in the UK building procurement process. It is established that despite the known benefits of POE, the culture of evaluating the performance of a building, after it has been built and occupied by users for a while, has not been successfully embedded in the design and procurement process. The authors advocate for a 'forward feeding' POE, which embraces early collaboration between end users and designers in the building procurement process, in order to co-create a liveable built environment.

Objectives: To explore the existing theoretical contexts of the job and environmental demands of the nursing profession in the National Health Service (NHS) and to investigate how these job and environmental demands impact on the personal constructs of older nurses within the NHS. Background: Nursing is the single most widely practiced profession in the healthcare sector in the United Kingdom. However, nurses contend with challenging job and environmental demands on a daily basis, which deplete them of personal constructs (or resources) required to stay in the profession. Methods: A multilevel exploratory qualitative research design was employed. Ten managers were interviewed for the preliminary study, based on which the three characteristics of an age-friendly NHS workplace were established: health, retirement, and flexibility. Then an in-depth literature review revealed that the most adversely affected job within the NHS was the nursing profession. Finally, a focus group study was undertaken with six older nurses working in the NHS. Results: The most compelling finding of this study is that older nurses would generally not want to stay on the job if they had to work in the ward area. The physical, cognitive, and sensory constructs of older nurses are negatively affected by the job and environmental demands of the ward areas. Conclusions: Understanding how these job and environmental demands of the workplace affect an older nurse's personal constructs may help support a better design of nurse work and the wards and help extend the working lives of older nurses in the NHS.

While many studies have explored either the physical or the psychosocial aspects of nursing tasks separately, this study suggests that the physicality of nursing tasks must be evaluated in tandem with their complexity. Ward managers may take a holistic approach to nursing tasks evaluation by using a nursing tasks demand matrix.

No abstract

This paper is a summary of the development, validation and testing process of a ward environment assessment tool (WEAT) for the post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of a hospital ward from the perspectives of ward nurses. Additionally, the study explores how architectural design features of hospital wards could be used to create a fit between ward nurses and the ward environment, by applying the Person-Environment fit theory (Vischer, 2007).