Healthcare workers across the world have been at the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. Hospitals are reaching capacity, and there are shortages of necessary supplies, all while working in the highest-risk environments. As such, some innovative solutions have been utilised to cope with the influx of highly contagious patients, ensuring enough beds are available without further outbreaks.

As a result of this pandemic, highlighting the shortfalls in health care systems and design globally, resolving these issues where possible before the subsequent mass-scale health crises is critically essential.

Some key concerns include:

• More remote healthcare services, telehealth
• Hospitals design anticipating more surge capacity
• The adoption of prefabricated/modular components allows for greater flexibility

Flexible Design

Hospitals need to be more flexible not only in the number of patients they can handle, but also in how they handle them. By rapidly transforming spaces at scale and isolating areas, such as ICU units converting into COVID-19 units, as some hospitals have done, hospitals can handle influxes of patients and prevent further outbreaks. To do so, it needs to be possible to easily cordon off areas of the hospital to mitigate the spread of an infectious disease. This requires, for instance, physically walling off the regions and installing advanced HVAC systems to purify the air effectively.

Modular design in hospital construction is also likely to become more prevalent. Modular design allows for custom-building spaces, including movable walls to adjust capacity and the ability to seal off areas from the rest of the hospital. Modular units also give hospitals the flexibility to devote the bulk of their space to a health crisis without having to curtail non-life-threatening surgeries or treatments. A modular wing of a hospital remains open and treats patients receiving elective surgery without jeopardising their health, safely cloistered off from the main hospital unit, even equipped with a separate ventilation system.

Changing Where Care is Delivered

Hospitals are designed differently from most buildings. Large elevators and wide hallways need to accommodate patients on hospital beds being moved around the facility. However, most were not designed to withstand such a rapid influx of patients as seen this year. This led to the construction of so-called alternative care facilities (ACFs), which helped ensure any patient who needed a bed or a ventilator could get one. Field hospitals were set up in some countries at convention centres, playing fields, and even parking lots. Some of these sites included thousands of temporary beds with medical the equipment needed to treat patients.

The future of medical centres is likely to include so-called micro-hospitals. These smaller-scale emergency care facilities are designed for shorter stays to help patients avoid longer waits and can provide the same level of care as larger hospitals.

These tiny hospital centres can already be found in some places, seen as a potential solution to address the inequality around access to care during a pandemic. In addition to taking some pressure off larger hospitals, micro-hospitals can be quickly built according to area-specific needs, even in communities typically underserved by existing infrastructure. This, in conjunction with increased investment in non-face-to-face health services, would offer citizens an urban environment better prepared for another pandemic event.