Post COVID-19 Reforms in Healthcare Design

There will be a great reform in the Healthcare design post-COVID-19 are you aware of that? Healthcare administrators have learned a lot during this pandemic situation and will focus on Pre-Planning. In this article Hospaccx Healthcare Consultancy has worked on Post COVID-19 reforms in Healthcare Design.

Introduction:

Communities and authorities across the world are battling the COVID-19 pandemic, which is being called the world’s most challenging crisis since World War II.  This is the first time in most of our lifetimes that the entire country is focused on solving one problem. It is also an opportune time to reform our healthcare system.

Each day we watch in awe as doctors, nurses, and caregivers bravely take on the greatest public health challenge of our lifetime, putting their health at risk to save countless lives. As parts of the country are reopening, we recognise that returning to normal will feel different.

Countries response to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlights several strategies that should be emphasised more in the management of the health care system. These strategies include using waivers to boost federalism, reconsidering the role of hospitals and other institutions as hubs for care, expanding the use of tele-health, and bringing together funds from multiple programs to improve the delivery of health care and health-related services. Nationwide lockdown which greatly reduced person-to-person contacts, the disease would have caused far greater havoc than it has. Had the pandemic been allowed to spread, our creaky healthcare infrastructure would have simply collapsed under the weight of the challenge.

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on the financial health of private medical facilities. With a lesser number of footfalls and increased burden to create the capacity to deal with the Covid-19 situation, these private healthcare facilities are suffering huge losses and some of them may shut shop soon.

Designing Healthcare infrastructure Post COVID-19 should focus on:

• Improving infection prevention. The hospital’s infection control/prevention team is going to become a louder voice in many design meetings going forward. There will be increased pressure to make design features more easily cleaned and use finishes that withstand harsher chemicals. More health systems will use UV light or sterilising mists in high- and medium-risk areas. Low-risk areas like exam rooms will need more thorough cleaning protocols and room turnover processes.
• Increasing isolation room capacity. The biggest conversion most facilities have undertaken during the pandemic is increasing the number of isolation rooms. Going forward, hospitals will need groups of rooms and entire units and wings that can be negatively pressurised and cut off
• from the rest of the hospital in a pandemic. These units will need easy ways to get patients in from the ED, as well as trash out, without going through the entire hospital.
• Limiting shared staff spaces. Many of the assumptions we have used in designing staff spaces may need to be reconsidered, including the size and separation of workstations within a staff workspace, number of people in an office, and the number of people sharing each workstation.
• Triaging patients before they enter the ED. The prevalence of tents outside of EDs during this crisis, and their susceptibility to weather events, points to a need to help our clients re-envision the triage and intake process. We need ways to triage people before they walk in the front door, including tele-triage, apps, and multiple entries and waiting solutions, based upon medical needs.
• Re-imagining waiting rooms and public spaces. Nobody liked the waiting room previously, but now it seems inconceivable that people will be willing to sit next to possibly infectious strangers while they wait for an appointment or a loved one's procedure. Trends like self-check-in and self-rooming will accelerate to minimize interactions with other people.
• Patients and families will be encouraged to wait outside or in their car. All public spaces including waiting rooms, lobbies, and dining facilities will have to be carefully planned and designed to create a greater physical separation between people.
• Planning for inpatient surge capacity. We’ve been designing for flexibility in hospitals for years, and now we must consider how a hospital could accommodate double or triple the number of patients.
• Questions to ask include, “How could two beds fit in every room?” “Which rooms can flex up to intermediate care or ICU capacity?” “How can surgical prep and PACU be converted into overflow ICUs?” and “If they are needed, how are emergency surgeries still performed?” We need to explore these questions through every building system.
• Finding surge capacity in outpatient centers. The continued growth in ambulatory care will resume as soon as our current crisis passes. Because many of these facilities are often owned by healthcare systems and already have emergency power or limited medical gasses, they have the potential to provide faster surge capacity, with fewer disruptions, than the field hospitals being erected in hotels and convention centres.
• Greater supply chain control. Hospitals and health systems will seek greater control of their supply chain and will likely stockpile key supplies, equipment, and medication to avoid future supply shortages.
• Telemedicine’s impact on facility sizes. Telemedicine has boomed throughout this crisis, allowing clinicians to perform routine check-ups and triage with patients without putting either doctor or patient at risk. While the future reimbursement for telemedicine is unclear, the impact on our designs will be tremendous. The technology is relatively cheap, physicians can see more patients in the same amount of time, and there are virtually no space requirements.
• Isolation operating rooms and cath labs. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on how to operate on an infectious patient require that the operating room remain positively pressurised, that it stays sealed throughout the surgery, and that no activity takes place within the room for an extended time after intubation and extubation. While important, these processes greatly extend the length of surgical cases and limit staff mobility in and out of the room before, during, and after cases. To function more effectively and efficiently, many more hospitals will want ORs and cath labs with the proper airflow and design to protect the patient from surgical infection while protecting the staff in the room and the surrounding facility from the patient.

Conclusion:

Unlike most healthcare design trends that develop over several years, these changes have already become necessary in just a few short weeks as hospitals and health systems were forced to figure out how to make emergency changes with limited supplies and resources. In the coming years, these organisations will need to adjust their operations for future pandemics, codes will need to be rewritten to safely meet these new situations, and government grants will be necessary to encourage

hospitals to make these changes permanent.

Future Healthcare infrastructures should be best to accommodate these new operational realities.

Are you planning to have such infrastructure? We can help you to design a healthcare infrastructure looking into future requirements.

If you need any support you can contact us: Hospaccx healthcare business consulting Pvt. Ltd on: [email protected] Or you can visit our website www.hhbc.in