Perspectives on Assessing the Flexibility of Hospitals for Crisis Mode Operations: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Netherlands

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic placed healthcare design at the heart of the crisis. Hospitals faced challenges such as rapidly increasing their intensive care unit capacity, enabling physical distancing measures, quickly converting to telehealth and telework practices, and above all, keeping patients and staff safe. Improving flexibility...

Pandemic resilience in Dutch hospitals: Flexibility that counts in a crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic placed healthcare design at the heart of the crisis. Hospitals faced challenges such as increasing their ICU capacity and enabling physical-distancing measures to prevent infectious spread. They also needed to co-house suspected COVID patients and nonCOVID patients with different requirements and enforce separate entrances...

Towards a resilient hospital design: Emerging design considerations for future healthcare facilities after the pandemic COVID-19

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of the healthcare systems in society. The pandemic overwhelmed hospitals and forced rapid and radical changes in healthcare organizations' working practices and management structures (MASS Design Group, 2020; Ramboll, 2021; Capolongo et al., 2020). The virus led to unfamiliar environments, new spatial...