Welcome
Letter From The Editor
In this issue we are pleased to bring you the exciting news that Dubai Healthcare City will launch a world-class tertiary care teaching hospital. This story has been developing for several months, as faculty from HMI, health care leaders in Dubai, a team of architects from a top firm, and clinical and administrative experts from throughout the Harvard medical community have worked together to design every component of the University Hospital.
Around Harvard
Judith Mitchell, AIA
Director of Planning
Harvard Medical International
Judy Mitchell began working with HMI in 1996, and joined HMI on a full-time basis in 2000. A trained architect and planner, Ms. Mitchell collaborates with colleagues at HMI, faculty, and our partners on the planning, design, and development of facilities and infrastructure to support health care delivery and health education.
Q: What are the first questions that come to mind from your perspective when an existing or prospective HMI partner expresses a desire to build a new facility?
Mitchell: Any health care or educational facility requires four basic elements to succeed: a clear vision, a strong development team, a scope that is in alignment with the available funding, and a business plan that lays out a strategy for long-term sustainability. In the pre-development phase of a project, these are the areas where we work intensively with our partners to ensure a solid foundation on which to build a successful project.
Q: What are some of the trends in health care delivery that are currently having an interesting influence on facilities planning and design?
Mitchell: One trend that is rarely discussed in the context of health care is the rapidly increasing global interest in sustainability. Most people don’t realize that globally, building emissions are bigger contributors to the depletion of the ozone than heavy industry and automobiles combined! Of all building types, hospitals leave one of the greatest carbon footprints, and yet because of the complex nature of hospitals, regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world have been slow to set policy to encourage sustainable health care development. With the support of our partners, HMI hopes to play a leadership role in this area, evolving new approaches to sustainable design in the health care realm which are both practical and financially viable.
Q: What are some common misconceptions about facilities design and development?
Mitchell: It is very common for developers to associate high-quality care with high-tech equipment, and this misconception often leads to building solutions which are little more than “wrappers” around expensive medical machinery. In fact, delivering high-quality care involves many factors among which are ease of access to providers, a service orientation, ongoing quality management, and infection control programs. Top-quality care teams require strong support services to function effectively and this in turn requires that equal attention is paid to the back of the house in the design of support space that facilitates efficient operations and logical process flow.
Q: What role do health care practitioners—doctors, nurses, and others—have in the planning process? How does their input impact the discussion?
Mitchell: The design process is not just about getting a building built. It is also an opportunity to create new models for delivering health care. For this reason, involvement of the entire care team is essential. At HMI we use the design process to help practitioners analyze how they deliver care in their existing environs and to explore new models to increase their effectiveness. We’ve seen the greatest successes come when new operational models are developed in tandem with the building design process. The same may be said about the development of schools where the facility design process can also be used to expose new opportunities for curriculum design and vice versa.
Q: What do you enjoy most or find most rewarding about your role at HMI?
Mitchell: Working internationally in as many countries as we do exposes us to an extraordinarily broad range of care delivery models and educational practices, each having evolved in response to a specific social, political, and regulatory context. There is no one right way to teach or deliver health care and there are many lessons to be learned from our partners. Each problem we tackle in one corner of the world sheds new light on a potential solution elsewhere around the globe. Some of our most interesting work has been done in resource-constrained countries, and it is my hope and belief that someday this work might show us the way to beating the spiraling cost of health care at home and abroad.
More Featrured Stories
Affiliate Spotlight
Quality contributions from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Briefcase
At the intersection of ideas with Dr. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School
From the Archives
Visionary leadership drives partnership focused on raising standard of excellence for leading Turkish health care provider
Around Harvard
Charting the genetic landscape of lung cancer, studying the aging brain, and revisiting the risks and benefits of hormone therap. Also: a look at the top health stories of 2007, and other news and research from the Harvard medical community.
