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What Will It Take To Create A New Generation Of Sustainable Healthcare Buildings?

Sustainability is an essential feature of the next generation of hospitals and healthcare facilities. This brings new challenges at every stage of the project. It also heralds an urgent need to integrate processes, shorten lines of communication and develop highly streamlined partnership working.

In all of this, we shouldn’t forget that hospitals are mixed estates featuring clinical, administrative and residential facilities. Sustainable design and construction have to apply to each area along with meeting all of the functional needs.

There’s plenty of research to show that fresh air, daylight, views and natural environments help patients to recover more quickly. And in sustainable design, sunlight can be your friend or your enemy as you seek to control the heating and cooling needs of the building.

Glazing materials, building orientation and shading technologies are all part of achieving the right balance so that, for example, an eco-atrium can be incorporated into the design in a way that enhances sustainability rather than creating a temperature control problem.

Avoiding Clashes and Design Reworks

Distribution of services is another critical consideration. In a hospital or substantial health centre this raises many challenges for designers. It brings the potential for clashes and the late-stage reworks that blow a hole in budgets and timing plans.

These issues can be avoided through early engagement with specialists and a digital design process that links directly with manufacturing and construction. Process integration is also the best way to liberate the creativity of designers while having the reassurance that plans can become real buildings with maximum efficiency over time and cost.

This is a radically different model for project procurement and delivery. It’s one that also addresses another long-standing issue – the gap between design performance and real-world energy use. Bridging this gap calls for precision and a material-first approach to construction to ensure that performance is built-in.

This may not be the traditional way of doing things, but neither is it entirely new. It’s the approach Osborne has used in partnership with others on many successful healthcare projects that have deployed modern methods and processes.

You can read more about the issues affecting the delivery of new healthcare facilities and find out about our unique approach to these projects by visiting our resource centre.

OSBORNE HEALTH RESOURCE CENTRE

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