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Sleek and Modern | Healthcare Design
The photos featured here came from a group/team of designers who performed work outside of the united states. Healthcare Facilities Magazine author Amy Eagled featured several world-wide projects that included United States Design firms such as Will + Perkins, HKS Inc., and RTKL. The original post may be seen in it’s entirety here.
The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London, England is a 129,200-square-foot, mixed-used project by HOK which required collaboration between the public and private sectors. | Photo by Paul Grundy
Large-scale overseas hospital projects help architects master efficiencies
For a variety of reasons, international hospital projects can be quite large. Whether because medical care in the region involves longer patient stays, the hospital is designed to be centrally located and served by public transportation, the national reimbursement system favors inpatient care or the hospital is part of a medical city designed to meet a population’s comprehensive medical needs, “some of these campuses are absolutely huge,” says Scott Rawlings, AIA, FACHA, LEED AP, vice president, RTKL.
His firm’s international health care portfolio includes the Catholic University of Korea’s Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital (1,200 beds); Shanghai Changzheng New Pudong Hospital in China (more than 2,000 beds), which is under construction; and the Military Medical Complex at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (4,000 beds), which is scheduled to begin construction early this year.
Projects of this size face significant challenges on the operational level, Rawlings says. Large facilities raise difficult questions about how to move information, materials, patients and staff in a controlled and humane fashion.
While working on the design of the emergency department for the Shanghai hospital project, Rawlings says the Washington, D.C.-based architecture team was “trying to get our heads around the [number] of people that would be moving in and out of this facility.” The only local equivalent they could find was the number of people in the week before Christmas who visit Tyson’s Corner Center — a D.C.-area mall that’s been identified as one of America’s 10 most-visited shopping malls.
“When you start to deal with that, and you start to find solutions, you start to develop a deeper bench — a deeper resource for how you solve communications and movement problems,” Rawlings says. These solutions can be applied to smaller, stateside projects, to make them more effective, he adds. “All of that work really has given us a jump on how you become more efficient in literally moving all the pieces you have to move in a hospital.”
Article Sources:
http://www.hfmmagazine.com/display/HFM-news-article.dhtml?dcrPath=/templatedata/HF_Common/NewsArticle/data/HFM/Magazine/2014/Jan/0114HFM_CoverStory
http://www.hfmmagazine.com/design-center/HFM-Design-Center.dhtml#prettyPhoto[gal3134]/3/
Photo Credits: Paul Grundy
http://www.hfmmagazine.com/display/HFM-news-article.dhtml?dcrPath=/templatedata/HF_Common/NewsArticle/data/HFM/Magazine/2014/Jan/0114HFM_CoverStory
