Flexibility is imperative to survival in the harshest conditions — a tree that won’t bend in the wind easily breaks. When it comes to the built environment, spaces that flex and adapt can remain resilient in the face of emergency scenarios, including pandemics.
Our global expertise has provided us with a unique perspective on the impact of the pandemic. From hospitals to clinics, offices to airports, laboratories to universities, we’ve experienced what’s worked — and what hasn’t — in planning and design around the world. Lessons from our expertise in biocontainment and biosafety can help all healthcare facility types with infection control and creating a safe atmosphere for patients and caregivers.
As we prepare for the future, we’re focusing on designing healthcare facilities that can adapt to any situation — today, next year or decades to come.
When designing healthcare facilities, consider that patient isolation can occur individually, or in flexible, scalable, cohorted models for biosafety.
Containment is limited with negative pressure rooms attached to a corridor. Pathogens within the room are secondary. The primary concern is in transferring pathogens to other spaces.
“Making a room negative pressure gives you a false sense of security because when you open that door you lose all your pressurization." — Healthcare Executive, Central U.S.
Here, staff are given appropriate space for donning and removal of PPE, while HEPA filtration continuously cleans the air within the patient care space. With the addition of the ante room barrier, pathogens are much less likely to escape.
Staff efficiency in a pandemic is critical. To save time, design an isolation area with multiple rooms without requiring full change of PPE when traveling between rooms. Create space and protocols to minimize spread of pathogens.
This ICU floor at Humber River Hospital was planned with scalable infectious disease control in mind as part of a comprehensive facility and operations strategy in the event of a pandemic. Redundant systems allow for a switch to isolation units at scale in the case of an infectious disease outbreak.
Conversion-ready, acuity-adaptable patient rooms are not new to healthcare design; several of our most advanced healthcare projects have employed this strategy. How can we best prepare our healthcare facilities to handle a pandemic surge?
With telemedicine's expanded use throughout the pandemic, how are healthcare facilities rethinking design?
Several experts detail design and operational strategies to reduce the risk of infection within healthcare facilities.
How have patient behaviors and mindsets shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic?
The Advocate Outpatient Collaborative, an Integrated Lean Project Delivery team that has spent the past six years rapidly delivering clinics throughout the Chicagoland area, dramatically shifted its focus on March 18, 2020, to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, delivering 26 fully-outfitted and operational emergency department overflow Surge Tents across Illinois and Wisconsin.
London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, called upon our architects to plan and develop design concepts for a temporary care facility. Including patient bays and staff support areas, this design concept was implemented to adapt the Western Fair District Agriplex building into a field hospital to assist with the expected surge of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bubbles of Hope completely reimagines how we respond to the challenges associated with care delivery during disasters. There are typically two components to disaster response: the field hospital and the temporary shelter. The field hospital puts caregivers right on the frontlines, in dangerous situations. What if, with 21st Century technology, we could employ a cloud-based approach?