Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused an unprecedented health and economic crisis around the globe, several countries, such as China and U.K., developed makeshift hospitals by converting public venues of other intended use (e.g., stadiums, convention centers, exhibition centers, gymnasiums, factories, and warehouses) to medical facilities, aiming to achieve in very little time a substantial upgrade of the health system's capacity. This change management capability is among the fundamental elements of infrastructure futureproofing, i.e., the process of making provision for future developments, needs or events that impact on particular infrastructure through its current planning, design, construction, or asset management processes. This article utilizes the limited available experience from these makeshift hospitals to shed light on the critical design parameters efficiently enabling the infrastructure to adapt to required changes in structure and/or operations. However, futureproofing should not be a standalone component but should be efficiently embedded in asset management practice. For this purpose, this article also proposes an appropriate associated delivery paradigm encompassing value management and building information modeling to allow the asset owners and designers to efficiently incorporate flexibility in their design planning. The structured approach of value management can be used to ensure that the project's characteristics are aligned to the public client's requirements for futureproofing while a BIM-based design management paradigm is particularly appropriate, as it allows for design changes to be shared, visualized, estimated, and resolved without the use of time-consuming paper transactions.
Highlights
ON December 31, 2019, the WorldHealth Organization (WHO) was alerted to a cluster of pneumonia patients in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China
Case of makeshift hospitals is totally different, in the sense that the selected venues had never been designed to be used for medical care purposes. Their primary feature is this of adaptability, i.e., the ability to be readily adapted or reconfigured in response to changing needs, uses, capacities, risks, or requirements [Masood et al, 2014].This change management capability is among the fundamental elements of infrastructure futureproofing, which can be defined as “the process of making provision for future developments, needs or events that impact on particular infrastructure through its current planning, design, construction or asset management processes” [Masood et al, 2014]
In the context of futureproofing and the associated design flexibility management, it is beneficial to identify the critical parts of projects where flexibility is needed and choose appropriate strategies for its implementation [Olsson, 2006].The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, unavoidably shifts the focus of futureproofing toward large public venues, which have the potential to be used as makeshift hospitals in case of emergency
Summary
ON December 31, 2019, the WorldHealth Organization (WHO) was alerted to a cluster of pneumonia patients in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. All hospitals must respond over their life cycles to changing demands imposed by shifting demographics, increasingly sophisticated medical technologies, workforce capacity, and capability issues, pressured public and private sector health budgets, and changing epidemiological patterns ([Carthey et al, 2011]; [Olsson and Hansen, 2010]). Adaptability can be defined as the ability of a building to meet shifting demands without physical changes. Examples of flexible design in hospital buildings can include structural foundations that allow additional floors to be added on top of existing buildings or areas that are built but not fitted out with medical equipment or functional rooms that may be refitted for medical purposes other than their original use [De Neufville and Scholtes, 2011]
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