THE DILEMMA OF FACILITIES INFRASTRUCTURE UPKEEP, AND THE LATEST TRENDS

I spoke with the facilities manager at a health system the other day. He sounded tired, frustrated, exhausted. I learned that they had just been told to do more with less. Spend less money, use less resources, use fewer people. And to somehow make the facility still work and succeed and stay functional. How is that possible? How can we expect our facilities folks to be able to keep up with expectations, broken down equipment and systems, and infrastructure? And then the trend continues into the future of patients having expectations for fancier, prettier and more technology.

We Architects tend to keep giving the prettier, fancier, more technologically advanced designs to our healthcare clients. Is this the way we should go? Should we as Architects allow this trend to continue and just go with the flow? Or should we take a step back and rephrase the question. The question of what is really necessary in healthcare. The question of what we should care about in healthcare. It’s not about the fancy buildings and the greatest and latest equipment. It’s about the people. 

One of the challenges I recently learned about is the fact that facilities departments across the country at healthcare facilities are struggling with recruiting future leaders in facilities. And the topic remains that we continue to design more and more complex buildings that will take more and more training for staff members. Therefore the need for facilities professionals is crucial to the continued success of healthcare facilities everywhere. Therefore, why don’t we make an effort to support such a profession?

Why do we shoot our facilities departments down and ask them to do more with less? As Architects we need to ask ourselves the question about doing more with what we’ve already got, instead of continuing to build bigger and better and more expensive.