AN OVERVIEW OF THE END-USERS’ PERSPECTIVES IN HOSPITAL PLANNING

Abstract

Background: Hospitals are a key component of an integrated health system. Hospital planning is a very complex process. The participatory approach in hospital planning involves input from the end-users who are those who will be using the facility, and their involvement are at all stages of hospital planning, namely: the project identification, appraisal and selection, implementation (designing, construction, commissioning) and evaluation. This paper aims to review the process of hospital planning, design, and construction from the end-user’s perspective and the inherent challenges.

Materials and Methods: This general review gathers the relevant articles from public domain databases, namely PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar. Official reports, guidelines and grey literatures related to hospital planning, design, and construction processes and written in English were also included.

Result: Hospital planning can be divided into several stages, namely the project identification stage, briefing stage, design stage, construction stage, commissioning stage, and post-occupancy evaluation stage. Throughout these stages, the end-users play both active and consultative roles to convey their needs and perspectives. The challenges of hospital planning from the end-user’s perspective are related to the changing healthcare trends, facility requirements and technological advancement. Balancing the demands of end-users and the other stakeholders is a challenging task for hospital planners.

Conclusion: Hospital planning is a very complex but organised process to make sure the needs of the end-users translated well into the final product. Henceforth, the end-user’s involvement either actively or consultatively in every stage along the hospital planning processes are very important.

Keywords: Hospital planning, hospital design, hospital construction, end-user.