The Design of Sustainable Healthcare Infrastructure: Improving Resilience, Energy and Waste Management

The relationship between healthcare infrastructure and sustainability is strong in terms of impact on whole life value, health and wellbeing. Delivering a sustainable health system, with sustainable healthcare facilities, requires a good appreciation of the value of sustainable design solutions in relation to the environment, economy, policy and strategy. There have been many initiatives and approaches that have emerged to encourage the sustainable planning, design and operation of healthcare infrastructure which resulted in identifying the various dimensions to sustainable healthcare infrastructure, including: transportation and access, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, waste and resilience. Given the number of issues and stakeholders to consider, there is a high degree of complexity involved, which resulted in tackling these issues individually and often fail to take into consideration broader and more holistic aspects of sustainability. This research project searched for ways to integrate mitigation and resilience theories in order to identify a holistic approach that mitigates the impact of CO2 emission on the environment and cope with climate change induced disruptions. The impact of natural hazards on healthcare facilities is much higher than technological and manmade disasters. This impact affected not only the internal systems of healthcare facilities but also the external infrastructure upon which healthcare depends. Further research is needed to improve the resilience of healthcare facilities and dependent infrastructure and services specifically in terms of connecting social and physical components. This project developed a framework to enhance the sustainability of healthcare facilities based on three core themes:
• resilience of healthcare facilities to natural hazards;
• energy reduction through refurbishment (Amey Sheth PhD: A Framework for Refurbishment of healthcare Facilities); and
• construction waste minimisation (Niluka Domingo PhD: Reducing Construction Waste in Healthcare facilities: A Project Lifecycle Approach).