Beyond Pandemic Planning and Design for Healthcare
Preparing Healthcare Facilities for Resilience Begins with Flexibility
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.
Negative Pressure Rooms Only
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.
Ante Room Barrier
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.
Cohorting an Entire Inpatient Unit
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.
Real Example of Scalable Planning and Design
Cohorting an Entire Inpatient Unit
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 Strategies for Pandemic Preparedness
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?
Telemental Health and the COVID-19 Behavioral Health Crisis
This analysis investigates telehealth, telemental health and telepsychiatry as protective measures during this pandemic and as a resource for therapy and crisis treatment during the COVID-19 mental and behavioral health crisis and beyond, and offers an up-close examination of design examples.
Webinar: Health and Mobility In Post-Pandemic Community Development
How can we leverage the need for improved access to healthcare — either as an essential worker or citizen — and reliable and safe access to transportation systems in our public and private development to spur social and economic progress in exciting new directions? This Bisnow panel discussion investigates the symbiotic relationship between health and transportation mobility.
High-Consequence Infectious Disease: Principles & Models for Patient Safety
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa raised awareness of the need for renewed efforts to safely care for patients with highly pathogenic infectious diseases. As the leading design firm for both healthcare and science facilities, we assembled a core team of planners, architects and engineers who have planned patient biocontainment isolation units and BSL-3 and BSL-4 containment facilities on six continents. This white paper provides an overview of the issues and ideas discussed during the colloquium.
Emergency Response Strategies In Action
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?