The coronavirus pandemic has brought to fore several loopholes of the Indian healthcare system. There are several reports where COVID-19 patients don’t have access to even basic health facilities.
This is mainly because we require 15 doctors and 20 hospital beds per 10,000 people but currently only half of that number is available. That translates to 64 million people underserved by the system, calling for an urgent need to address this shortfall.
With the current strain on the public healthcare system in the congested metros, the first step would be to add a layer of primary healthcare fabric in urban slums and rural areas. This can endorse health awareness, offer preliminary remedial assistance, and help distribute the burden across public healthcare infrastructure, enabling affordability.
According to Rahul Kadri – Partner and Principal Architect, IMK Architects – primary healthcare centres are smaller, cost-effective, and can act as an initial shield for more serious health issues in such areas, eventually branching out to medical sub-centres in each village.
“There also exists a need for well-equipped speciality hospitals in districts, which would cater to the rural population from each of the district’s talukas. However, building specialty hospitals in rural areas and achieving optimal built quality is still an uphill challenge for government-funded healthcare buildings. Solving this issue through biophilic and interactive design interventions could help in improving the standards of public healthcare, while regulating construction costs. Adopting simple processes to prioritise critical healthcare services and conceptualising design solutions keeping all stakeholders such as patients, doctors, nurses and staff etc. in mind can ensure public healthcare facilities have low maintenance costs and are affordable to the communities they serve,” Rahul Kadri said.
A few common issues that plague current hospitals are inadequate day-lighting, poor ventilation systems leading to cross-infection, greater building widths leading to improper day-light, wide buildings that result in doubly-loaded corridors with no connection to the outside, high energy costs and maintenance problems.
Kadri feels that cross-infection and contamination can be tackled through design changes such as naturally-ventilated spaces that increase the rate of natural air exchange, segregation of different functions by creating general, semi-sterile and sterile zones (for example, waiting areas to OPDs to ICUs) and creating buffer zones in between.
Also, designing decentralized micro-service zones that run parallel to various departments can help make regular servicing and maintenance easier and quicker.
“Today, as our understanding of health and wellbeing evolves, new construction technologies provide limitless possibilities in this sector. Building Information Modeling (BIM), for example, can help determine the optimal geometry of buildings in response to certain parameters; pre-empting problems and shortening the time of construction to save costs, while ‘temporary and transformable’ architecture can enable emergency mitigation like never before. Imbibing such innovations within healthcare design holds the key to streamlining our systems for better performance,” he said.
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