HEALTHCARE FACILITY RESILIENCE ‘‘
Healthcare authorities are key in pushing for greater facility resilience by creating or leveraging standards, and developing benchmarks for climate resilience in the healthcare sector. Their involvement throughout the process is vital to the success
and provide evidence for each item. The Compliance team’s role was to assess the adequacy of each response, to determine if more information was needed before final review and sign-off. The second tool was the Resilience Summary Report that details how climate resilience was incorporated into the final design. This was essential in obtaining relevant input from each design discipline to provide a holistic picture of the project, and build a clear narrative for further communications. By keeping the owner’s needs at the fore of each design stage, the team maintained climate resilience continuity through the design process.
Key conclusions Overall, the experience has shown that each team member has a critical role to play in the successful design and construction of climate-resilient facilities. Healthcare authorities are key in pushing for greater facility resilience by creating or leveraging standards,
and developing benchmarks for climate resilience in the healthcare sector. Their involvement throughout the process as resilience champions, coupled with clinical stakeholder engagement, is vital to the success of resilient facility design. Project managers must consider climate
resilience early and iteratively throughout the project lifecycle to meaningfully inform design decisions, while engaging a diverse, cross-disciplinary, and well-informed team to mitigate risks. Design-build teams need to engage in the project assessment process to understand the context and implications of different design choices. It’s imperative that they acknowledge that old standards are not suited for future climate conditions, and that collaboration is critical to everyone’s success. Resilience teams must be involved
throughout the process – from developing the statement of requirements, to ensuring proper measurement, documentation, and compliance. They are there to provide climate information and guidance, and
Lisa Westerhoff leads the Climate Policy and Planning team at Integral Group in Vancouver. She works with local governments, universities, developers, and industry organisations to create policies and strategies for a low-carbon built environment. With a PhD in urban sustainability from the University of British Columbia, she brings expertise in climate change, sustainability, and resilience planning, to projects ranging from zero-emissions building plans and post-occupancy evaluations, to energy and carbon disclosure policies, and city-wide climate and energy strategies.
to help define and navigate what elements should be considered across all disciplines.
n This article, titled ‘Adapting to Climate Change: Guidelines for planning and designing resilient healthcare facilities’, first appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Canadian Healthcare Facilities, the magazine of the Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society. HEJ thanks the author, CHES, and the magazine’s publisher, MediaEdge, for allowing its re-publication here.
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