The art and science of designing a hospital anywhere is a complex affair. Beyond technical requirements that modern medicine demands and rigid functional relationships between different medical departments, the designer has to cope with a host of more subjective issues like the anxiety of the patient, the stressful work environment of the staff and the need to build a sustainable and healing building; Hippocrates’ injunction to the medical community being, “First, do no harm.”
Step 1: Project Conceptualization:
The first step is to freeze the concepts in terms of:
- Identification of the market needs
- Finalization of the facility matrix
- Deriving the appropriate size of the project
- Determining the possibility of getting skilled manpower
This step aids in determining the project cost bearing and its viability in future. A detailed market survey by conducting household surveys, Doctors surveys and Institutional surveys is mandated to have enough data for analysing to arrive at facility mix required for the proposed project.
Step 2: Detailed Project Report:
Next Step is to understand the feasibility process to identify the project cost in realistic manner. Hospital building are very complex in its engineering needs and hence the project cost needs to be broken down into following:
- Civil Works
- Electrical Works
- Plumbing Works
- Fire fighting
- Air Conditioning
- Landscape and Horticulture
- Elevator
- Medical Equipments department wise
- Non Medical Equipments like Kitchen, Laundry etc
- Hospital Furniture and Fixtures
- Professional fees
- Pre Operative expenses
- Local taxes and deposits
- Contingency
Step 3: Architectural Consulting:
An appropriate Functional and Space programme is very important to the healthcare facility design process having detailed aspects of the existing assessments, planning objectives and vision for future, existing and proposed workloads, proposed operation time, proposed staffing, operational and support systems, equipment list and other functional adjacencies. The Space programme provides a list of all rooms or areas required for each function and total area required for the function.
Step 4: Site Selection and Analysis:
Usually, Clients often (almost always) comes with the map of a piece of land and the desire to build a healthcare facility. Many times, it is found that the shape and size of the piece of land is unsuitable for the desired facility. There are major four factors- location, size, shape and orientation for a proposed healthcare facility, out of which the most important is location.
Whether, urban or rural, location is an important determinant for its financial success.
Step 5: Engagement of Design Team:
In Conceptualization, design, Construction and commissioning of any successfully run healthcare project, a Design team constituting of Hospital Planner, MEP Consultant., Architect, Structural Consultant, Project management Consultant, Electrical Consultant, Lighting Consultant, Network Consultant, Kitchen designing, Laundry designing, Land Surveyor, landscape Designer, Interior Designer and Biomedical Engineer.
Step 6: Block and Grid Planning:
Block and grid planning helps in ascertaining to house various kinds of inpatient facilities, various diagnostic and therapeutic departments, Outpatient departments, Midway circulation and other ancillary services.
An Attempt has been made to explain how the pre-design programming of a Healthcare facility with short description of how to advance the design process with conceptual drawing.
Further stages of the healthcare design shall be posted soon. In case of any clarification please feel free to contact me on caremarqueenterprise@gmail.com
Payal Thakker
Director | Primary Healthcare & Quality Consultant | Biomedical Engineer
Caremarque