Serious impact of poor planning shown

Sonia Cédres de Bello, an architect, Professor, and researcher, at the Experimental Development Institute at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Central University of Venezuela, discusses how the extremely busy emergency department and surgical suite at Caracas’ oldest hospital, the Hospital Vargas, were remodelled – under a Venezuelan government healthcare initiative – in a project that took six years to complete. She describes what she dubs ‘the serious impact and implications on the performance of a hospital when such a massive intervention is undertaken without proper planning’.

Abstract

 This paper analyses the design, project management, and construction work entailed in of the renovation of the emergency department and surgical suite of an old, highly complex healthcare facility in Caracas which has a School of Medicine, and encounters high patient throughput due to its location in the centre of the metropolitan area of Caracas. The project, involving an area of 3,000 m2, had to overcome obstacles including security, the site’s location, and its immediate environs. The article describes the remodeling project, and some of the lessons learned, in some detail.