Dr. Jenn Davis

Walk into almost any new women’s facility and you can find the medical suite by process of elimination. It’s the room with no windows, or the one wedged beside the plant room, or the one that turns out to be two rooms because a structural column wouldn’t move.

People read that as priorities. I read it as sequencing.

Here’s how these buildings actually get made. An executive briefs an architect on capacity, identity and commercial requirements. The envelope is drawn. Circulation, structure and plumbing get locked. A scheme is approved, often announced. Then, somewhere after that, a clinician is invited in to review the plans.
By that point the only honest answer available is yes or no. You cannot relocate a treatment suite once the drainage is set. You cannot add a private consult room when the corridor is fixed. You cannot create a pelvic health space out of a column grid that has already been poured. So the clinician validates what exists and the building gets a sign-off that looks like clinical input.

The room wasn’t deprioritised. It was never in the brief. Nobody in that chain made a bad decision; the decision was made before the person who knew the answer was in the room.

The fix is almost insultingly simple and almost never done: clinical requirements belong in the brief, before the first drawing — alongside capacity and identity, not after them. Which spaces, which adjacencies, which privacy requirements, which plumbing. On day one, where it costs nothing.

If you’re briefing a facility this year, this is the cheapest intervention available to you, and the window closes fast.

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