Rethinking the Power of Architecture that Promotes Healing in the Context of a Pandemic
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2021) | Viewed by 6609
Special Issue Editors
Interests: indoor air quality; users’ wellbeing; public health; health promotion; health and built construction; evidence based design; healthcare design
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: higher education; smart hospitals; telemedicine; medical education; simulation;team training; patient safety curriculum design; work based assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: healthcare design; healthcare facilities; evidence based design; flexibility in healthcare
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
It is natural during the unfolding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to focus on emergency response planning, including containment, treatment procedures, and vaccine development, and nobody would doubt the need for these measures. However, an emergency can also open a window of opportunity for reflection and learning. We live in increasingly global, interdependent, and environmentally constrained societies, and the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies these aspects of our world.
In response to the emergency, multiple design and management strategies have been proposed for healthcare facilities, such as the construction of prefabricated structures or external volumes close to hospitals, emergency camps, or significant transformations of some functional areas inside the healthcare facilities, etc. There has been a renewed discussion about emergency departments, nursing homes, and community health centers being totally restructured to guarantee better performance while protecting residents and providers who treat team.
We would therefore be wise to take a broad integrated perspective on this disease, the impacts of which are already spilling over into the realms of economics, international trade, politics, healthcare design, and inequality. The scope of the Special Issue is to collect contributions from medical, design, and management fields related to design and management best practices, organizational and technological strategies, hospital layouts and healthcare processes, tools and predictive models for risk management, etc., not only limited to hospital settings, but also to working and living environments, and other typologies of facilities.
Resilience planning needs to cope with these cascading impacts, and prevention efforts require a similarly wide lens to encompass ecosystems, disease surveillance, healthcare operations, and cultural traditions and contexts. In other words, we need a planetary health perspective that cuts across traditional domains of knowledge, governance, and economic sectors to properly address the healthcare design challenge posed by COVID-19.
We welcome submissions on all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic using scientific evidence supported by international case studies. We strongly recommend learning from relevant experiences, reviews and empirical studies, data-analysis, comparisons among case studies and investigations, predictive models, economic benefits and impacts, design and management strategies, etc. The Special issue is not limited only to healing architectures, but also to several typologies of facilities as long as the contents are relevant to the Call.
Multidisciplinary research groups composed of physicians, designers, managers, scholars, etc. are particularly appreciated. This collection aims to become a practical tool for future emergencies, merging many international experiences and best practices.
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary research that integrates across important knowledge domains to provide a fuller understanding of the causes and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19, as well as public understanding and responses, the efficacy of healthcare designs that support innovative management and prevention interventions, and approaches for the identification and prevention of future such events within the wider context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Prof. Stefano Capolongo
Prof. Paul Barach
Prof. Debajyoti Pati
Prof. Göran Lindahl
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- healthcare design
- hospital layouts
- healthcare processes
- design and management strategies
- pandemic emergency
- best practices
- healthcare facilities
- quality of care
