The healthcare industry is one of society’s most important sectors providing life-saving care at the individual level while also laying the foundation for overall public health—the bedrock of any successful society. That said, the industry is fraught with challenges that must be juggled alongside these imperatives, and margins are too often tight.
While dealing with challenges, it’s important for the healthcare industry to continue to grow, meaning new construction and renovation to meet the needs of a growing population with extra attention to health. In this article, we take a brief look at how new techniques and technologies in construction can provide the support necessary for the healthcare industry to achieve growth through ever-changing challenges.
Challenges Facing the Healthcare Industry
It’s a tricky business in healthcare, literally.
Considering the extreme importance and even moral component of healthcare, it is—after all—a business. Depending on how they are run, the state of the economy, and unforeseen market conditions, healthcare companies must be nimble to stay profitable, which means being able to provide care at all.
Growth is essential to business, so the ability to handle challenges while also forging ahead is necessary for a world of great healthcare and outcomes.
The latest challenges facing healthcare facilities include inflation, labor costs, and supply chain disruptions. Some, like the supply chain, can be worked out slowly over time by revising new suppliers and more efficient chains. Labor costs and inflation are hard to plan for, and therefore their negative impacts have to be offset in other ways. One way to do this is to rely on modern tools, materials, and techniques during facility construction.
How to Optimize Modern Healthcare Construction
When it comes to the need to build out and renovate healthcare facilities to accommodate growing populations and corporate growth, companies look to advances like the following in the construction industry to achieve their goals:
Collaboration
Optimizing collaboration may seem obvious, but it isn’t always the case. Construction projects involve corporate management, architects, engineers, general contractors, subcontractors, material suppliers, and local governance, and the coordination between them can determine how quickly—and at what cost—construction can be completed.
When margins are tight, this is a surprising area where savings can be found. Simply coordinating early can have dramatic effects, and the addition of modern communication technologies can help it succeed.
In short, with great planning and communication come great outcomes that stay on time and on budget.
Intelligent Modeling
The vast advancement of technology has allowed planning to become easier to achieve and to share. Relying on intelligent modeling allows for the ability to virtually alter a healthcare building’s design quickly. Just imagine the difference in time having to redraw one aspect of a blueprint rather than make the changes in a program! The ability to make changes rapidly and the information the results afford allows for possible impacts on labor, material costs, and time constraints to be spotted quickly so the team can stay agile and not overpay or overproject.
Prefabricated Materials
As with digital technology, material science and manufacturing have also grown exponentially and seek to create better, stronger materials that also ease installation while providing the necessary attributes needed in construction. One such innovation is prefabricated materials that, as the name implies, are manufactured off-site and delivered such that they can be readily installed rather than manufactured on-site. This saves both time and labor costs with no impact on structural ability. In fact, prefabricated materials are often times stronger and more effective than traditional materials, which can pay off long term.
Energy Efficiency
Cost saving plans aren’t just about the short term, but also the long-term. There is no better example of this than when it comes to how thermally efficient a building is. By using the right materials and application techniques, savings from long-term energy efficiency are significant. Technologies like insulated concrete forms (ICF) work to build highly thermally efficient walls while also being quick to build, and insulation techniques like continuous insulation plug thermal breaks that, across a large building, can add up.
It’s important to recognize that in the healthcare setting, climate control is a top concern for patient health and sanitation, which means an array of advanced assortment of HVAC equipment and systems. The proper energy efficient foundation for them to operate in will lower costs long-term while making sure their function, and thus the environment within the building, is optimal for healthcare.
Designing with Nature
It turns out that nature has positive effects on health! Fresh air and sunlight, for example, are powerful tools in healthcare, both in acute healing and mental health (itself an important component of healing).
Designing for optimal natural light can provide an atmosphere far more conducive to effective healing and positive outcomes than artificial lighting, and will also save dollars spent on those systems. While not every room can benefit from natural light, it’s important to keep natural light in mind during the design phase to maximize what is possible – even with renovation.
Modular Temporary Walls
An often overlooked aspect of construction is the mess involved, notably dust and fine particle debris. It’s simply part of construction, but a huge difference can be had between designing for and managing it than simply dealing with it at the end.
Traditionally, dust containment has been performed by erecting temporary walls that block it. When it comes to renovation, temporary walls perform an incredibly important role in healthcare in that they maintain the conditions necessary for optimal healthcare protocols to proceed. At minimum, it keeps construction projects separated from ongoing healthcare activity, but most importantly, it keeps dust and debris away from patients and staff. When performing construction in an active healthcare setting, an Infection Control Risk Assessment (ICRA) needs to be performed in order to ascertain what controls need to be put in place to maintain a safe setting.
The most effective solution to this challenge is the use of prefabricated temporary modular wall systems. Before this technology, construction firms had to build temporary walls like real walls using studs and drywall. Not only does this introduce more dust that must be cleaned up before the actual construction takes place, but it requires materials, labor, and will eventually need to be disposed of.
These issues are taken care of with prefabricated temporary modular walls. The wall systems from SwiftWall®, for example, are installed 5x faster than traditional stud and drywall temporary walls, can be installed in situations of varying ceiling height, and are reusable. Reusability is important because construction firms can apply them to multiple projects, and as they complete phases, or healthcare facility managers can employ them whenever temporary walls are needed for renovation or other situations that may arise.
SwiftWall® Flex is an especially powerful tool for healthcare construction because the temporary wall system meets ICRA Class V requirements to provide negative air capabilities for infection control personnel, a must for many of the sensitive areas within healthcare facilities. SwiftWall® Flex offers a virtually seamless install via aluminum joiners that adhere one panel right into the next panel. Closed-cell foam core ensures a non-hygroscopic construction and the panels are easily disinfected with common disinfectants or cleaners. SwiftWall® systems can be quickly uninstalled and moved to a new location as construction progresses, something impossible with temporary walls.
Work with SwiftWall® for Modular Temporary Walls Designed for Healthcare Construction and Renovation
There are many ways to meet the challenges in healthcare construction to allow for further growth and success. SwiftWall® is proud to offer a game changing temporary wall solution with their wall systems that are purpose-built for the demands and sensitivities of healthcare construction.
Contact our team of experts today and we’ll help analyze your build or renovation and find the perfect solution to keep your healthcare facility up and running in order to maintain the healing environment necessary for positive patient outcomes and experiences.
