Question

When someone goes to the hospital, the primary thought on their mind is feeling better. Few give pause to consider how caring for their health impacts the well-being of the planet. However, medical facilities create a tremendous amount of waste daily and consume single-use plastics, energy, and water voraciously. As an engineer who values sustainability, you are asked to design a creative sustainable hospital which can benefit patients, visitors, nurses/doctors and also the society at large. Explain with examples on how it can be made into a true “healing hospital” for the society without causing financial drawbacks to owners of the hospital.

Answer 1

The need for hospital design guidelines that better enable sustainability is evident. By focusing on passive, active, and renewable design details such as building orientation, solar shading, improved HVAC systems, increased daylighting, and drought-resistant gardens, architects and building planners can design hospitals that protect the environment while continuing to improve patient wellness and recovery time, and staff retention rates.

Main aims of the sustainable architecture are:
-long-life building design that can adapt to flexible and changing conditions
-efficient use of limited natural resources
-use of renewable energy sources
-reduction of waste
-Minimizing health and safety risks
-ensuring healthy indoor air quality
-taking measures to reduce environmental pollution
-protection of biodiversity

The relations of the buildings with the environment can be at different levels according to their functions. The interaction of an educational building or a detached dwelling or a factory with the environment is different. Hospitals on the other hand is seen as a major management making service production, a complex building including different functions, a dense building housing various users and a continuously revolving and changing building where medical technological equipment is used. Addition to these characteristics, hospitals are the type of buildings where energy and water consumption is high, the amount of chemical and non-chemical waste is huge, the output of potential hazardous material is high, the number of bought materials is various and many, waste storage and extirpation areas are required and it is obligatory to use renewable energy resources for sustainability.

The new approaches like “green (ecological) hospital”, “healing hospital” are mentioned in current hospital designs. When the continuously dense usage situations of hospitals are considered, the concept of “green hospital” is used to define the hospitals fulfilling at least one of the alternatives such as choosing environmental settlement design, buying nature friendly building materials and products, being environmentally sensitive during the construction of the hospital building and keeping this sensitivity going in service production process. Green hospital defines a facility which recycles, reuses the materials, reducing wastes and giving more clean air to the environment. This approach based on an environmentalist management understanding is seen under the headlines like management of waste and hazardous materials, water management, energy management and air emission regulating system and innovator environmental designs

“Healing hospital” understanding handled as “patient centered” not “care centered” defines innovative environmental designs and aims at patient friendly and non-scary hospital environments. In this scope; designers entered the process of changing patient, staff and visitor experiences by designing healing, improving, relaxing and friendly welcoming spaces. Natural mediums gained importance , the designs which cares user satisfaction and can be naturally aerated and lightened are adopted. In spite of that making use of environmental factors in architectural design (use of day light, use of dominant wind as an input in design, use of topography, visually improving the environmental quality, enriching vegetation, increasing landscape) is important for any building design, it becomes more important in health buildings.