Eco-friendly medical center design targets social equality, comfort and patient healing while decreasing its negative environmental impact and increasing its productivity and profits. Sustainable health care facilities implement their eco-friendliness in various ways, but incorporate their goals and methods into core principles that don’t vastly differ.
You might find that a cancer treatment facility includes sunshine and greenery as primary factors in calming and improving patient moods while reducing energy consumption with more sunlight. Alternatively, a mental health facility might use green roofs to absorb heat and carbon dioxide while better controlling stormwater runoff and providing a visually appealing and calming area for patients. Medical spaces use fundamental design principles to encourage sustainability and patient health and well-being.
Why Sustainability Is Essential in Health Care
Considering sustainability when designing a medical space is crucial for many environmental, financial and clinical reasons. It provides patients, the planet and institutions with numerous significant benefits. Some of the design strategies that provide benefits include the following.
1. Targeting Climate Change
While some contributions to global warming and climate change are natural, such as volcanic eruptions, tectonic shifts, Earth’s orbital changes and solar radiation variations, others are anthropogenic, or human-influenced. You know many of these well — fossil fuel generation, growth in human industry, transport and livestock all contribute to the greenhouse gases by raising carbon dioxide levels and influencing overall temperature levels to encourage global warming.
Health care facilities that incorporate sustainable design methods directly target global warming by generating fewer greenhouse gases, reducing energy consumption and, as a result, decreasing running costs. Besides, you’ll likely agree that patients experiencing more daylight and natural ventilation, combined with fewer air pollutants, will be physically and mentally healthier. They’ll have more vitamin D exposure and a regulated circadian rhythm.
2. Focusing on Encouraging Natural Elements
Sustainable designs impact climate change, but these eco-friendly strategies also create healthier indoor environments by using methods that can improve patient and employee health.
Antimicrobials and Natural Treatments
Built-in antimicrobials in products and materials keep medical spaces cleaner by preventing mildew, mold and bacterial growth on surfaces, reducing the spread of germs and, potentially, viruses. You’ll find antimicrobials in many products, from pesticides to antiseptics to disinfectants. In addition, health care administrators might introduce natural treatments into their sustainable designs. If you’ve undergone ozone IV therapy, you’ll understand how this oxygen-based gas dissolved in your bloodstream can deliver full-body benefits.
Daylighting
Daylight maintains your natural circadian rhythm, lowers your blood pressure, strengthens your body’s immune system and allows you to think clearly. Designs using innovative features that encourage sunlight, like large glass windows and doors, skylights and atriums, light up health care facility interiors. This improves staff productivity, lowers operating costs and carbon emissions, and improves patient health and moods.
Energy Recovery Ventilation (ERV)
Health care administrators can improve their profits by reducing reliance on HVAC systems, primarily by using ERV systems that enhance incoming air quality with fans and modern technologies. They maintain a continuous flow of fresh outside air while removing older, stagnant air. Regulating room humidity reduces the chances of coughing and experiencing dry eyes and skin caused by air conditioners.
Green Materials
Designs using green building materials reduce the chance of exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other dangerous airborne chemicals that may cause respiratory issues. VOCs are often toxic, carbon-based compounds in the air that you’ll find in many traditional building materials and paints.
Natural Ventilation
Designing windows to open and including ventilation systems that let in natural air lets everybody inside a building breathe in more fresh oxygen. This boosts brain and heart health, improves digestion and cleanses the lungs.
3. Incorporating Energy and Water Saving Techniques
Besides daylighting, natural ventilation and ERV, health care designers and administrators can employ several other energy-saving techniques to achieve sustainability goals. The energy sector — incorporating power, transport and industry — is the heaviest global producer of harmful emissions, so your focus should always be on conservation first. Saving water, an essential natural resource, is also paramount. You can easily incorporate many of these sustainable health care design techniques into your water and energy-saving efforts at home.
Adaptable Floor Plans
No matter who you are, if you’re constructing a new building, strategize to include a flexible floor design for long-term use. Doing so means you’ll likely be able to restructure your facility to suit any changes without needing additional construction, saving energy in the future.
Green Spaces and Water Conservation
A health care facility that includes green spaces, like gardens, terraces and accessible green roofs, encourages patient physical and psychological health through fresh air access and stress reduction. Places with plenty of vegetation also encourage water savings by reducing runoff during heavy downpours. Instead, you’ll support insects and plants. Adding bioswales and water tanks will help save further, along with low-flow appliances in bathrooms and kitchens.
LED Lighting
LED lighting is extremely energy-efficient compared to most other lighting forms. For example, LEDs last up to 25 times longer and consume as much as 90% less energy than incandescent bulbs. Their colors, wavelengths and temperatures in health care environments allow for better mimicking the circadian impact in patients, likely creating more positive psychological effects.
Renewable Energy Production
You’ll see solar power trending as a renewable energy source, and its incorporation in health care facilities offsets harmful carbon emissions and saves on running costs. Many medical organizations operate in multistory buildings in urban areas, making them perfect candidates to include photovoltaic equipment and solar panels on rooftops. You’ll also come across more facilities using solar shading in awnings, canopies and adjustable shading devices.
Sustainable Health Care Facilities Benefit the Environment and Patients
When you mention sustainability, people immediately think of the Earth’s health. However, it also extends to health care. Designs include ways of promoting the health and wellness of patients and staff members alongside the obvious eco-friendly benefits. Facilities can also save on expenses through sustainable initiatives, making this a viable option to consider when designing or upgrading buildings for the benefit of people and the planet.
Beth Rush is the green wellness editor at Body+Mind. She has more than five years of experience writing and editing articles covering topics like sustainable transit and the importance of green spaces in urban planning. You can find Beth on Twitter @bodymindmag. Subscribe to Body+Mind for more posts by Beth!
Image by hbelir
