Residential Aged Care
Gnullingoo Mia Residential Care, Carnarvon
Residential Aged Care integrated within an existing hospital and health campus
Carabiner designed this residential aged-care facility to accommodate
complex clinical requirements, elevate efficiency for staff and, importantly, to offer a sense of ‘Gullingoo Mia’ or ‘our home’ to its residents.
Client
Department of Finance on behalf of Western Australian Country Health Service
Location
Carnarvon, WA
Construction Value
$11.8m
Completed
December 2021
Carabiner Team
Project Director: David Karotkin
Other Key Staff: Ahmad Salam, Siobhan Page
Includes:
38-bedroom facility including low, medium and high-care rooms.
Specific palliative care rooms including additional space for extended family attendance. Diverse Resident amenities including lounges, dining areas and restful alcoves.
Staff meeting rooms, offices, staff stations, reception space, clean and dirty utility spaces
Outdoor gardening space, courtyards and an activity shed for resident use, including a dementia-friendly courtyard
Western Australian Country Health Service (WACHS) appointed Carabiner to design and deliver the state-of-the-art Carnarvon Residential Aged Care facility to replace the existing derelict building.
Our design maximises operational efficiency by optimising sightlines of resident areas from staff stations, and by increasing flexibility to close or open up different resident spaces. With future need in mind, we outlined the potential for a 22-bedroom expansion in our masterplan.
Working closely with consultants and staff, we derived solutions to several challenging aspects of the project. With a requirement to integrate the aged care facility into the existing hospital and health campus, this project involved designing to extensive clinical and healthcare requirements.
To accommodate residents during construction, we developed a staging and decanting strategy to allow residents to remain at home on site. WACHS consulted the Bundiyarra-Irra Wangga Language Centre and Inggarda elders in naming the new facility ‘Gnullingoo Mia Residential Care’, which means ‘our home’ in the local Inggarda language.
In addition to overcoming challenges of the site and a tight budget, our design provides a warm, comfortable and inclusive home that, by carefully considering the needs of all residents, is worthy of its name.