Exploring Sustainability in Healthcare Spaces: HOSMAC Hosts Hospital Engineering Summit 2023
Mumbai: HOSMAC, Asia’s leading Hospital Planning and Management Consultancy, successfully hosted the 4th Edition of its Hospital Engineering Summit (HES) in Mumbai. This year’s summit centred around the theme of ‘Sustainable Hospital Design’, addressing challenges, solutions, and global best practices in creating healthcare environments that are enduringly sustainable.
Hospital Engineering Summit, initiated by HOSMAC in 2018, serves as a platform to deliberate the significance of hospital design optimization. It brings together industry stalwarts to discuss various relevant topics around hospital planning & designing, which can help make a hospital efficient in the long-run.
Hospitals are one of the most complex buildings in terms of design— be it catering to the multiple users of the facility, promoting healing, adding flexibility to spaces for evolving standards and technology or reducing energy consumption of these sleepless facilities. The summit explored how design solutions can address the various complexities of healthcare facilities keeping energy-conservation and sustainability at its core.
It brought together stakeholders from multiple sectors, including hospital owners, CXOs, planners, architects, engineers and design consultants, to help delegates in their quest in building new as well as upgrading existing healthcare facilities. There were 24 speakers from various sectors who passionately discussed topics that included energy conservation through architectural design, digital solutions in making hospitals green, hyper-automation, indoor air quality and engineering maintenance, among other discussions.
Addressing the august gathering, Dr. Vivek Desai, Founder & Managing Director, HOSMAC, said, “HOSMAC launched the Hospital Engineering Summit in 2018 to provide a knowledge platform to interact and learn the latest solutions in hospital design and engineering. This year we chose to explore Sustainable Hospital Design as the central theme, because these facilities are energy-guzzlers, negatively impacting environmental and economical health. We are delighted by the enthusiasm and engagement shown by the participants.”
The keynote address was delivered by Ms. Deepa Sathiaram, Executive Director, En3 Sustainability Solutions, who stated, “Green buildings impact six SDGs laid down by the UN, including clean water & sanitization, energy conservation, sustainable cities & communities, responsible consumption, climate action and lastly good health & well being. Under buildings, healthcare is the second largest carbon emitting sector, as it is highly energy-intensive. If we can start to embrace sustainability from the start i.e. the planning & designing phase and further moving to operations and maintenance, it will accelerate India’s goal of achieving the target of net-zero emissions by 2070.”
Speaking about human-centred hospital design, Dr. Santosh Shetty, CEO & Executive Director, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, said “The concept of new-age hospital designs have a focus on patient safety and patient experience. Elements like area segregation, patient mobility, lighting, and acoustics, once overlooked, now wield profound influence on outcomes, a significance which was magnified during the pandemic. Today, hospital design centres around human-centric design, recognizing its power to heal patients, help the staff perform better, and elevate the entire healthcare ecosystem.”
Some of the other notable speakers included Dr. Sanjeev Singh, Medical Director, Amrita Hospital Faridabad, Mr. Nithyanand Natarajan, Joint GM & Head – Health Business Initiatives, L&T Construction and Dr. Parag Ringdani, CEO, Wockhardt Hospitals.
The knowledge shared and the connections forged during this Summit would surely bring out transformative changes in the domain of hospital design and inspire a dialogue on enhancing hospital designs for greater sustainability.