Improving Healthcare through Built Environment Infrastructure is a selection of contributions both from practitioners and academics on issues surrounding the healthcare built environment in terms of policy, strategy, and operations. It is clearly intended as a resource for both academics and practitioners as it covers issues as diverse as facilities planning, delivery of healthcare facilities, and operation and maintenance of healthcare facilities and evaluates them from the point of view of both theorists and practitioners. What is unique is that the healthcare built environment and not the actual medical provision is the focus of this selection: hence giving a voice to issues related exclusively to the healthcare built environment.
The book primarily looks at the predominantly public healthcare system in the UK, but also has a few chapters covering the healthcare system in the USA. The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK has recently seen considerable capital investment and policy reform since the year 2000 and this collection is a timely resource evaluating the challenges and opportunities that have arisen due to the policy shift towards providing healthcare nearer to the communities and taking the focus away from community hospitals towards home care and local hospitals. Since there is now an extensive use of complex technology for booking and diagnostics throughout the healthcare system, we find chapters evaluating the role and impact of facilities professionals on technology implementation and complex service provision in healthcare environments like NHS hospitals and community healthcare centres.
The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 gives voice exclusively to the practitioner's perspective. Here practitioners talk about political agendas and their impact on healthcare facilities planning and public health procurement. Chapters also extend the reader's understanding of how healthcare policies and healthcare infrastructure design actually impacts the built environment, and provide examples of award-winning hospital designs. Challenges faced by healthcare facilities professionals when dealing with technological change are also discussed at length. Public Private Partnership initiatives in the UK (called LIFT: Local Finance Improvement Trusts) are discussed, alongside the significance of good design on operational ease and sustainability.
Part 2 has theory-building contributions from academics examining tangible and intangible characteristics of healthcare built environments. The significance of the Strategic Service Delivery Plan (SSDP), the changing nature face of healthcare through telecare, primary and acute service provision, sustainable procurement within the service, risk management, design, continuous improvement and other Facilities-related issues are discussed and developed at length.
Improving Healthcare through Built Environment Infrastructure has a diverse range of contributions providing an extremely balanced and well-rounded view of how healthcare infrastructure has changed over the recent years and what challenges it poses for facilities and design professionals. The no-nonsense appearance of the book is clearly representative of its content: pertinent, original and well structured. Every chapter presents a different facet of the debate: case studies and examples of best practice are provided, and new frameworks and approaches are presented. All in all, this is a valuable new resource that is representative of the kind of research that is being done with regards to Facilities and healthcare service provision.
It is worth noting here that Facilities had a special issue on Facilities and Patient Care in 2009 and a special issue on Facilities and Psychiatric Care in Vol. 31 No. 9/10.
