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My LSBU…
Robert Gregory

MSc Planning Buildings for Health

My life at LSBU

To get to LSBU I’d travel by train from Surrey, where I live, to London Bridge. Walking out of London Bridge Station and onto the bridge to catch the 133 bus down to Elephant and Castle was always a reminder of how well situated LSBU is to the heart of the city – and how connected it is with the capital.

The classrooms we worked in were mainly in the Keyworth Building, which were light and airy, with good views over the surrounding area. The support facilities in the Perry Library and Learning Resource Centre were really helpful, with easy access to IT facilities, and a good stock of hard-copy material.

I was lucky to find a dissertation subject that was directly relevant to my day job. This enabled me to spend a period of around nine months focused on the dissertation in my private studies and in my day job.

MARU made a point of ensuring that practitioners currently working in the field of healthcare buildings development were invited in to present their work and research, so that we could easily understand how the theory we were learning was being applied in practice – and so that we were always exposed to cutting edge thinking.

Work/life/learning in London

I trained as a nurse in the early 1980’s, and, after specialising in Intensive Care, moved onto various project management positions in the 1990’s. After working in healthcare buildings development for the best part of ten years, the MSc was the logical next step. My employer and I agreed that I was at a point where I needed to formalise my extensive practical knowledge with an academic grounding in the field of healthcare buildings development.

My employer funded me to undertake the course, which involved one week units – four per year – and then a lot of self-directed learning and assignments in between these. We undertook a field trip to Madrid and Barcelona in the second year, looking at developments in Spanish health architecture and comparing and contrasting this with the UK approach.

My dissertation, which looked at the impact and implications of developing new hospitals with high percentages of single rooms in the NHS, is very relevant to the work I am now leading on at my Strategic Health Authority, and has directly informed my practice.

Despite being a part-time, mature student who was only formally on campus four weeks per year, I felt valued by the University, and was given every opportunity to participate in the wider life of LSBU.