HCD Virtual will be held Nov. 9-12 and offer a variety of keynote and breakout sessions delivered over four days. Healthcare Design is previewing some of the upcoming educational sessions in a series of Q+As with speakers, sharing what they plan to discuss and key takeaways for attendees. For more on the HCD Virtual schedule and registration, visit HCDvirtual.com.

Session: The Many Roads to Resilient Design, Monday, Nov. 9, 12:30-1:30 p.m. EST
Speakers:

  • Julie Frazier, director of healthcare planning, associate principal, Perkins&Will
  • Megan Recher, sustainable building advisor, Perkins&Will; Willa Kuh, director of planning, Affiliated Engineers Inc.
  • Joss Hurford, building performance consultant, Affiliated Engineers Inc.

Now more ever, healthcare organizations are looking for designs solutions that anticipate the disaster-scale climate events and diseases of tomorrow. In this session, the speakers will discuss available resilient design standards programs and share case studies to substantiate the client experiences with them. In addition, a new tool specific to the design assignment will be presented, further enabling attendees to select the route that best fits their clients’ resilient design needs.

Healthcare Design: How is the pace and intensity of disasters and emerging diseases driving a need for resilient design?

Julie Frazier: Evidence of the increasing need for resilient design is readily available. One needs only spend a few minutes on an internet search to find articles and videos of government, real estate, and healthcare leaders expressing their desire and intention to increase the resilience of their facilities and services. Additionally, public opinion surveys show more than 70 percent of U.S. adults understand climate change to be occurring and more than half of all U.S. adults understand it to have adverse health effects.

Within the design community, the call for qualifications and resilience design experience from architects and engineers is a more regular part of requests for proposals than in previous years. Professional organizations like the American Institute of Architects and ASHRAE are actively working through committees to understand changing design needs specific to resilience and inform their membership to advance the entire industry.

There are a variety of tools available today that address resiliency. How can a design team figure out which approach is best for a project?

Frazier: The best tools for a project will vary. It’s going to be the ones that best represent the regional and local data and are recommended by the design team as superior for the scope of the project. It’s the design team’s responsibly to be familiar with available tools and to start and guide the tool selection consideration.

What’s a common misconception about resilient design in the healthcare design industry and how will your session help clarify it?

Frazier: That the hazard vulnerability assessment tool adequately identifies the need for resilience and is the document where a hospital commits to its responses to that need. This tool and the process of generating it adds value to the resilience design exploration and is a great starting point. Through this session, the speakers will demonstrate the value of pairing this assessment with more rigorous and sophisticated analysis.

For more on the HCD Virtual schedule and registration, visit HCDvirtual.com.