The Built Environment´s Influence on Resilience of Healthcare Services: Lessons Learnt From the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges for healthcare services, which have been forced to upscale their capacity to cope with successive surges in demand. The adjustments to match capacity to demand and deal with a new disease have involved creativity and solutions that were not part of the pre-pandemic standardized operating procedures. Those changes are considered manifestations of resilience. This paper focuses on the role played by the built environment of healthcare services during the pandemic, in terms of how it is integral to resilient performance. As such, we investigated the experience of a leading private hospital in Brazil, documenting the main changes related to the built environment and how they influenced resilience. Data collection involved eight interviews with hospital staff. A content analysis allowed the development of a generic functional model of the patient journey and the identification of ten resilience practices. Based on this, six lessons learnt were devised. These lessons are expected to be useful for the design and use of the built environment, supporting the resilience of services.

The Built Environment Influence on Resilient Healthcare: A Systematic Literature Review of Design Knowledge

“…From an organizational perspective, resilient healthcare is defined as the “ability of the healthcare system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required performance under both expected and unexpected conditions’’ (Hollnagel et al, 2013, p. xxv). Studies that explicitly address resilient performance and the BE are usually focused on coping with natural or man-made disasters (Achour & Price, 2010; Capolongo et al, 2020; Keenan, 2020; Ochi et al, 2020; Ransolin et al, 2021). These studies approach the BE from a technical rather than socio-technical perspective—for example, the cooling of buildings to protect against climate change, heat waves, and power outages (Attia et al, 2021; Re Cecconi et al, 2018).…”