Scaling Up Healthcare Capacity At Speed

With the virus threatening to overwhelm healthcare organisations and in some countries the numbers of patients that required hospitalisation exceeded the beds available.  Many of our clients responded rapidly and added ICU beds and isolation rooms or wings and created temporary facilities to treat both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients. Our healthcare experts quickly assessed existing systems and designed solutions that could be implemented at speed to meet the needs of hospitals and communities. Our teams of advisors, mechanical and electrical engineers, medical gas experts, commissioning agents, and testing and balancing professionals worked with our clients’ teams to formulate solutions that could be implemented immediately to meet the urgent needs for increased healthcare capacity. 

Projects include the upgrade - in just three weeks - of an unoccupied medical building into a facility that is providing homeless citizens in Boston USA  with a place for care and quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Hong Kong, two of our people were part of an eminent team of local engineers who, in their own time, have developed a solution for rapidly increasing isolation ward capacity through the transformation of shipping containers  into high-tech isolation rooms. We have also been involved in the creation of field hospitals and supported the acceleration of planned construction projects to get more beds online quickly.

Moving forward, the focus is on recovery

While helping our clients deal with the immediate impacts of the coronavirus, we are also looking forward to understanding how the consequences of this pandemic will influence the shape of healthcare in the future. For example, COVID 19 has expedited the successful adoption of telemedicine, where patients can consult with their doctors over video instead of going to hospital for routine check-ups or minor conditions. Find out more here.

Healthcare in the future will look very different from today. The experience of COVID-19 is reinforcing our focus on supporting our Healthcare clients in the delivery of technologically smart, resilient buildings with the flexibility to adapt and respond to even the most critical of our global populations’ ever-changing healthcare needs.