Tuam Primary Care Centre

Tuam's urban population may be just over three thousand people but with more than five and a half thousand rural residents, the new primary care centre (PCC) provides a vital service to a much wider community.

Built on land at the former Grove Hospital, the 2,600sqm centre offers a one-stop shop for community care in the region and the base for a wide range of community-based services including general practice, dentistry, physiotherapy, social work, occupational therapy and public health nursing amongst others.

The PCC has been built for the Health Service Executive (HSE) who had already taken the project through design and planning before appointing Prime to review the plans, ensuring they represented best value, innovation, quality and future-proofing in design.

The team at Prime used its extensive experience in healthcare planning to make a number of recommendations and improvements. These included reorienting the reception and dividing waiting areas into two separate zones, one for Primary Care Teams and one for GPs. This has the benefit of improving wayfinding for patients and visitors while ensuring clinical facilities are located adjacent to their allocated waiting rooms.

Prime has also aided the local authority and HSE by demonstrating how a planned GP suite extension could be used, planning the space to include a waiting area, surgeries, offices and nurses room.

A number of practical improvements have been made to the layout to ensure the centre runs as efficiently as possible, including the relocation of rooms to allow for closer adjacencies to corresponding facilities. These alterations enable a fluid workflow, improving the working experience for staff.