Reinventing the clinic? Consuming hospital spaces in the PFI era
Since 1997, Labour has overseen a new hospital building programme in the UK that has been heralded by Tony Blair as part of a ‘new civic building programme that will rival that of the Victorian age’. These hospitals, primarily funded through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), are depicted as setting new standards in healthcare facility design. In this paper, we examine the distinctiveness of these designs, exploring the rhetoric that proclaims them as offering new levels of clinical efficiency and patient care in a distinctly ‘non-institutional’ setting. Emphasising the homology between these designs and the (il)logics of the marketplace, we conclude that this new generation of hospitals is indicative of an important shift in the locus of healthcare from the world of the service user to the world of the consumer.