Järvenpää: From health centre to wellbeing campus

The aging population needs more health services, but at the same time municipalities have fewer tax payers. The solution to providing the same level of services with less tax revenue is meticulous planning of the facilities.

Järvenpää, a town in southern Finland with a population of 40,000, is currently developing a new model for a health centre that will combine under the same roof a number of health and social services.

“We want to provide services to residents not only more quickly, but also with higher quality and in better facilities than before,” says Mr Jari Toivo, CEO of Kiinteistö Oy Järvenpään Terveystalo, the wholly municipally owned company dedicated to the project.

Järvenpää is located a little less than 40 kilometres north of Helsinki and is one of the most densely populated communities in Finland. Back in 2008, the town’s decision-makers realised that several of their health and social service properties were not only in need of renovation, but were also scattered around the town. On top of that, Järvenpää residents were unsatisfied with these services. The idea was mooted of a new health centre that would be designed together with the prospective users of the building.

Now, six years later in November 2014, the actual work of constructing the new centre has begun. Of the total EUR 51 million in financing, NIB is providing EUR 20 million, the other main financier being Municipality Finance Plc. Inspira has acted as the financial advisor for the project. The new centre is expected to be ready by the end of 2016.

Maximum user satisfaction

The design phase of the project was exceptional, as it employed a unique Virtual Planning and Building model. In reality, this meant that the building’s design phase involved all the future users of the centre: doctors, nurses and potential customers got together with building professionals to test the construction solutions in a 3D simulation environment and evaluate the planned functionalities.

“This model brings significant monetary savings, as the right decisions are already being made in the planning stage. This streamlines the upcoming operations and will considerably decrease the need for modifying the finished building. The end result is both sensible in terms of construction, and also functional for the building’s users”, says Mr Toivo.

“Back in the budgeting phase, we already had targets regarding the building’s construction engineering, utilisation rate and costs. These targets forced us to focus on quality instead of the lowest price. For instance, we wanted the building to be energy efficient and utilise geothermal solutions in heating”, explains Mr Toivo.

The new centre is expected to consume 3,100 MWh of energy a year, which is 10% less than the current facilities do. This decrease equals approximately 60 tonnes of CO2 a year.

The residents of Järvenpää will benefit from the new centre in many ways. In addition to gathering the currently widespread services together under the same roof, the centre has novel facilities for customers to take more responsibility for their own wellbeing. For example, they can use a variety of electronic services in the centre to get more information about their health and examine different treatment options or receive guidance and support from a specialist.

“The people working there will value the transformable spaces, the result of a careful, collaborative design phase. The solutions chosen will be ideal for the health and social care professionals who’ll be using them”, says Mr Toivo.

From health centre to wellbeing campus

The vision of the centre is that a ‘wellbeing campus’ for people of all ages will arise around the new health centre, which will unite barrier-free housing solutions and wellbeing services. This block will host apartments designed specifically for elderly people, a care unit, a 24/7 nursery and a family centre.

Mr Toivo predicts that this solution will bring several new actors into the area, bringing great benefits to the town of Järvenpää:

“I expect that the wellbeing campus will attract new enterprises to Järvenpää, as the concept is well defined and there’s room for even more services that we haven’t even considered yet. The whole wellbeing sector is witnessing drastic changes as people age, but people also have increasing interest in their own health in general. People are more willing to take responsibility for their own wellbeing, and even to invest in it”, concludes Mr Toivo.