Lifetime Leadership Award Winner 2011

Chair of Judging Panel
John Wells-Thorpe
International Advisor, International Academy for Design & Health

Criteria
Awarded to a healthcare leader and visionary who has shown an ongoing, lifelong commitment to enhancing the health, wellbeing and quality of people’s lives through their dedication to healthcare design. The award recognises the human and personal qualities needed to push back the boundaries of progress and inspire future generations.

Derek Parker, winner of the
Design & Health Lifetime Leadership Award 2011

Winner

Derek Parker FAIA, RIBA

Nomination
"Having worked with Derek for 29 out of his 50 years dedicated to Anshen+Allen, I know I represent only one of the many generations of architects, engineers, Clients, design consultants, along with doctors, nurses, technicians, patients and families around the world touched by Derek’s “magic”, who are in awe with his aspirations and achievements, entrepreneurship and unequalled gravitas.

At the helm of the firm - both in the US and in the UK - for 39 out of his 50 years with Anshen + Allen, Derek offered meaning and pride to many who - like me - spend our professional lives designing and building hospitals with a purpose and with a heart. Through his building designs and emergence as a leader on an international scale, Parker is among a group of architects who have inspired an industry to innovate, elevate and revolutionize. As such, he has significantly impacted healthcare design.

His accomplishments include the creation of breakthrough innovations in healthcare projects, the cultivation of a practice to grow from the local level to an international entity, and the leadership to spur healthcare designers to respond to changes in the healthcare industry.

In 1964, when Bob Anshen died unexpectedly, Parker stepped into a leadership role, expanding and elevating the size, scale and breadth of Anshen+Allen’s work and placing it on the international stage. Parker’s strong conviction that health and education are the foundation of civilization led the firm to focus on healthcare and academic design.

Derek Parker (centre) receiving the Lifetime Leadership Award 2011 from Prof Alan Dilani of the International Academy for Design & Health (left), and Eb Zeidler, Lifetime Leadership Award Winner 2010 (right)

Parker approaches each project as an opportunity not only to further the goals of a healthcare organization, but also to advance the state of healthcare design. Known for introducing unconventional healthcare design elements that are now commonplace and replicated by others, he is a strong advocate of evidence-based design, a field of research documenting the ability of design to improve patients' healing, reduce medical errors, enhance efficiency, and increase the satisfaction of patients, staff, and physicians.

Parker co-founded the Center for Health Design, one of the leading organizations dedicated to improving healthcare practices through evidence-based design research and implementation. He also co-created the ‘Fable Hospital’ (an ideal facility that integrates evidence-based design) which is commonly used as a model for estimating design cost impacts against operating healthcare benefits.

One of Parker’s greatest contributions is his ability to instill a passion in his colleagues to pursue new directions in healthcare design, cultivate deeper relationships with clients, bridge the gap between healthcare providers and healthcare designers and build organizations to elevate and transform the healing and treatment environment.

Over his 45 year career, Derek has given hundreds of presentations, written more than 18 transformative works, and founded, been a member of, or advised more than 25 organizations dedicated to improving healthcare, including: The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI); The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF); The Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE), National Academies; and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Believing in architects’ unique training as problem-solvers, he encourages a culture that nurtures architects’ creativity to help clients meet the challenges of the future.

Derek Parker, FAIA, RIBA is the 2008 recipient of the California Council of the AIA’s Distinguished Practice Award. This award recognizes an individual architect’s work, his or her responses to the challenges of an individual building type, innovations within the design and construction process, design excellence and a demonstrated collaborative spirit. The award is given in recognition of a career that exemplifies dedication and commitment to the built environment.

On Wednesday, the 5th March 2008, the AIACC recognized Derek Parker, FAIA, and his career characterized by professionalism, leadership and innovation.

As a disciple of Mr Parker’s for 29 years, I learned a great deal from his infinite belief in the power of design. I gained confidence in our ability as healthcare architects to make a difference to the experience of a cancer patient, to the mother of a newborn watching her baby hooked up to a myriad of tubes in the NICU, and to the nurse spending hours caring for an adolescent in a bone marrow transplant unit.

Spurred by Mr Parker’s example, I also dared to push the envelope and to challenge the ostensible limits of the client-architect relationship. I often felt inspired to persuade the CEO, the departmental manager, the chief investigator, and the head of surgery, among others, to join the struggle for evidence-based design, a concept championed by Mr Parker. I increasingly saw the value of engaging them as stakeholders in the creation of the unique ambiance that conveys honesty, a confidence in the quality of care, and commitment to innovation.

I had the pleasure of meeting Derek’s mother, Ada, and Derek’s brother, Graham, in the early 1980s, when I was seconded to Arup’s office in Birmingham. Having lost Derek to the American promise that inspired so many young ambitious British architects back in the late 1950s, they nevertheless knew that while far from his homeland, Derek kept in high esteem those supreme values of courage, integrity, and honor, instilled in him as a young boy during the war years.

Moreover, with the understanding of socialized healthcare, as provided in post-war Britain, Derek became a messenger of democracy and access to healthcare in California where he decided to practice architecture.

Mrs Parker and Graham would have been very proud indeed to know that Derek’s ideas, commitment to healthcare design and above all, hard work, are sending “ripples” through ponds and oceans alike, via an entire generation of new hospitals worldwide, including in the country of his birth."

Felicia Cleper-Borkovi