Statement Cor Wagenaar
“A cure and care continuum should evolve that results in a sustainable, effective and comprehensive approach to public health which, ultimately, is based on healthy lifestyles.”
Years of fearful anticipation have finally proven to be justified: a virus caused a pandemic, and countries all over the world took action (so much so that some experts now fear that in the long run, the social and economic consequences of the policies they initiated might have worse consequences on public health than the immediate effect of the virus). Epidemics and pandemics always result large numbers of people who need medical care – they highlight the blessings of decent medical facilities with well-trained personnel. When a pandemic occurs – luckily this hardly every happens – the world looks to the medical professions for support, and in when there is a health crisis they dominate the news. And for good reasons. Pandemics put national healthcare systems to the test: if a nation’s medical care is unaffordable and inaccessible, the consequences will be disastrous, and the calamitous effects will not be limited to those who do not have the financial resources to pay for treatment.
What does the current crisis mean for the future of healthcare architecture? Do we need to reconsider the reform policies that have been defined in the last then years and slowly began to impact hospital landscapes around the globe? In my view the current situation doesn’t (and shouldn’t) alter the future course of hospital architecture (as outlined in the recent ENAH-symposium Health Care of the Future). It is just simply not possible to bring a healthcare system in a permanent state of war against pandemics. Moreover, the social and economic consequences of today’s crisis will be so immense that not a single country will be able to afford such policies. Quite the contrary: the need for a healthcare system that is much more efficient than the current ones and guarantees a much higher quality will only increase. Faced with the prospect of financial meltdown, many healthcare systems already began to prepare themselves, however reluctantly, to move in this direction.
Mainstream hospital architecture should connect to non medical, health promotion and disease prevention strategies, which the WHO has identified as having a much bigger impact on public health. A cure and care continuum should evolve that results in a sustainable, effective and comprehensive approach to public health which, ultimately, is based on healthy lifestyles. These may even help to mitigate the consequences of pandemics of the kind that causes so much havoc today. There is rapidly growing body of scientific evidence that pinpoints to obesity as substantially increasing the risk of covid-19 patients to end up in the Intensive Care Unit – in some hospitals the percentage of obese people is more than 80 % - obesity is one of the condition that can be tackled by healthy lifestyles…
The current Pandemic calls for exceptional solutions (for instance the stack of IC-units Nickl & Partner Architekten proposed for Munich), or clever transformation strategies for hotels, as are now being proposed for Berlin. These policies rely on the existing hospital landscape – only these can provide the trained staff, and staff, ultimately, is the bottleneck – but they are emergency measures that should not affect mainstream hospital architecture.
Cor Wagenaar, chairman of the ENAH advisoy board