Transforming health systems and infrastructure: exploring global, community and human perspectives

A typical general district hospital is one of the most complex buildings to design, construct and operate, and the exciting but disruptive digital revolution and advances in artificial intelligence makes the future needs and solutions hard to predict. However, one thing is certain: we can always learn from the past to avoid making the same mistakes.

The New Hospital Programme seeks to take a programmatic approach to the transformation, design, delivery, and renewal of a significant proportion of our healthcare assets, with innovative solutions that will be fit for purpose long into the future. Use of a standardised modular approach gives us the opportunity to invest in a library of knowledge assets and standardised solutions that can be replicated or adapted for reuse across the entire portfolio of current and future projects. The design approach for ‘Hospital 2.0’ is based on a core principle: we’re not designing ‘a hospital’, rather we’re designing ‘hospital’.

This innovative strategy will dispose of the large, inefficient, expensive, and out-of-scale, with its community nature of the typical hospital and, by design, break free of standard thinking to embrace a new way: we call this ‘The Essential Hospital’ – smaller, more efficient, less expensive, and in-scale with its context. These novel building typologies will incorporate new construction and delivery methods to save money and time, and support better health outcomes.

The ambition is to deliver projects faster, better and more sustainably, while providing greater economic value and buildability. The four pillars that underpin the NHP are: delivering transformational patient care; providing optimised infrastructure for health delivery; hospitals for now and in the future; and built efficiently while operated and maintained to last.

Through prefabrication and modularity, the programme will deliver consistent, quality healthcare facilities, while providing flexibility into the future to accommodate changes in technology and healthcare delivery.