Emergency Healthcare Facilities: Managing Design in a Post Covid-19 World

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused an unprecedented health and economic crisis around the globe, several countries, such as China and U.K., developed makeshift hospitals by converting public venues of other intended use (e.g., stadiums, convention centers, exhibition centers, gymnasiums, factories, and warehouses) to medical facilities, aiming to achieve in very little time a substantial upgrade of the health system's capacity. This change management capability is among the fundamental elements of infrastructure futureproofing, i.e., the process of making provision for future developments, needs or events that impact on particular infrastructure through its current planning, design, construction, or asset management processes. This article utilizes the limited available experience from these makeshift hospitals to shed light on the critical design parameters efficiently enabling the infrastructure to adapt to required changes in structure and/or operations. However, futureproofing should not be a standalone component but should be efficiently embedded in asset management practice. For this purpose, this article also proposes an appropriate associated delivery paradigm encompassing value management and building information modeling to allow the asset owners and designers to efficiently incorporate flexibility in their design planning. The structured approach of value management can be used to ensure that the project's characteristics are aligned to the public client's requirements for futureproofing while a BIM-based design management paradigm is particularly appropriate, as it allows for design changes to be shared, visualized, estimated, and resolved without the use of time-consuming paper transactions.