From Crisis To Prevention: Documenting & Highlighting The Missing Role Of Architect In Post-Pandemic Healthcare Of Pakistan

Abstract

Role of Architect and his design towards enabling and optimization of healthcare facilities in critical. During Covid-19 pandemic, Pakistan major shortfalls in the existing healthcare system were highlighted with major gaps in integration of healthcare design experts and architects towards transformation of existing facilities to Covid-19 centers. In Post-pandemic Pakistan, there existed a strong need to evaluate how far the previous lessons learned have been incorporated in policy making and future design of facilities. The study explored 62 published documents related to healthcare facilities standards, requirements and functional development from provincial and federal government departments as the baseline exploration. Keywords were identified through recent research exploration of similar studies in post-pandemic timeline. The exploration showed that Architect term has been mentioned only 34 times in all of these documents with evidence based design and built environment as key words completely missing. The gaps highlighted shear differences and disconnect between healthcare policies and architectural design innovation in post-pandemic time. Research further argues the role of architect to be defined as a healthcare designer in the context to help optimize the facilities for future challenges through bridging these highlighted gaps and assisting Pakistan towards proactive preparation for future healthcare endeavors at large.

Keywords: Architect, Architecture, Healthcare Design, Hospital, Minimum Service Delivery Standards, Pakistan, Future Healthcare Design.