Peacetime car park to wartime hospital

 The architects have also designed a 2,000-bed subterranean emergency hospital, which will occupy three storeys below, that will serve as patient, visitor, and staff car parking during peacetime, but be rapidly convertible for medical use in times of conflict. Health Estate Journal reports.

The International Federation of Hospital Engineering (IFHE) held its 21st international congress last year in Tokyo. Considered to be among the most important events in the field of hospital engineering, the congress was attended by healthcare estates and engineering personnel, hospital managers, doctors, engineers, and scientists, from all over the world. At the event, Arad Sharon, whose grandfather Arieh, and father, Eldar, were both prominent Israeli architects who designed some of Israel’s best-known public buildings in the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, explained that the new US $42m Ruth Rappaport Children’s Hospital, and the US $58 m Sammy Ofer below-ground emergency hospital, are taking shape at the heart of a major regional healthcare campus originally established in 1938 during the so-called British Mandate. Today the Rambam Health Care Campus is home to Northern Israel’s largest hospital, and is a tertiary referral centre for 11 district hospitals. The facilities there provide services including trauma treatment for both civilians and military personnel, oncology, and neurosurgery. The campus also accommodates, in the existing Meyer Children’s Hospital, Northern Israel’s only such facility dedicated to paediatric medicine, which is also a major centre for education and research. The existing Rambam Hospital has 36 departments, some 1,000 beds, 45 medical units, and six laboratories.

Among the first of its kind