In the wake of lessons learned about existing healthcare infrastructure, its ability to cope with exceptional clinical demand and pressures over the past year, HKS Architects consider ‘the optimum model of hospital for pandemic preparedness.
In the wake of lessons learned about existing healthcare infrastructure, its ability to cope with exceptional clinical demand and pressures over the past year, and where some of the main challenges lay, Sophie Crocker and Dan Flower of HKS Architects consider ‘the optimum model of hospital for pandemic preparedness’.
We write this from the middle of England’s third lockdown. To date, as we write, there have been over 3.75 million cases of COVID-19 in the UK, and recorded deaths have just surpassed 100,000. However, a glimmer of hope has arrived on the horizon, as the Pfizer/BioNtech, Moderna, and Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccines are all currently reporting high rates of effectiveness. 1 By the time you’re reading this, the situation here, and around the world, will no doubt have changed – hopefully along the same trend of positivity. 2020 was a tumultuous year (perhaps the understatement of the century), and, as the world continues along its expected trajectory, a certain level of turmoil must be assumed as the status quo. Pandemics are not the only shared health threat resulting from our increased global spread and impact. The climate crisis is intensifying natural disasters like wildfires and floods, making them increasingly devastating, and the very human threat of terrorism unfortunately persists through it all.
What the last year has given us is a wake-up call. Around the world countries have dealt and are dealing with the virus differently. The UK’s healthcare estates have been put under pressures they have never before experienced, with many wards, and much of the infrastructure, services, and social facilities, designed in a time that did not – or could not – envisage the world of today, with all of its potential healthcare ramifications. This is because the impact of the pandemic is not only seen in the number of patients testing positive; there is a long-lasting ripple effect, the full extent of which healthcare organisations around the world may not be able to measure for many years yet
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