The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how a crisis can create an urgent need for additional capacity that is temporary in nature. Governments and health authorities across the world must be prepared for a second surge of seriously ill patients, even though it is hard to predict where and when this will occur. As we enter the recovery phase and seek a ‘new normal’, temporary additional capacity may also be required in social infrastructure such as schools and prisons in order to facilitate social distancing and infection control.
In order to make the best use of resources in these circumstances, and to build resilience against other unpredictable threats in future, infrastructure clients could benefit from being more agile and flexible in how they plan, deliver and repurpose assets. Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) is an approach that can help provide this, through modular building units that can be assembled quickly, easily and repeatedly. Using components that are mass produced in an efficient and safe factory environment, facilities can be prefabricated and transported to the required location, reducing local transport and infection risks. Mott MacDonald has a wealth of experience with DfMA and is ready to assist clients with projects that provide adaptive resilience and flexible infrastructure.
The challenges that health and social infrastructure clients are facing include:
- Limited timeframes for crisis infrastructure mean that approvals from operational staff and other stakeholders must be gained very quickly. In this environment proven, off-the-shelf designs and a standardised system for equipment and working practices are preferable.
- Traditional construction methods are hindered by social distancing rules required to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This is a driver for more prefabrication and assembly, an approach which limits the scale and complexity of what must be done on site as well as ensuring assets can be commissioned and made operational faster.
- The areas where new facilities are required include those that are most hit by the COVID-19 outbreak and densely-populated urban centres where it is important to minimise transport movements and the size of the labour force.
- Disruption to supply chains, with limited international availability of components and factories hit by workforce absence, makes bespoke or unusual design elements more problematic and puts the emphasis on standardised components that are readily available.
- Concerns over the cost and negative publicity of ‘white elephant’ facilities lying unused for long periods when they are not required. These can be allayed by creating flexible facilities that are available for multiple uses and can be repurposed – either at the same location or a different one – after they have performed their primary function, or moth-balled for future use.
Mott MacDonald has pioneered rapid build technologies in the sports and events sectors, and has vast experience in the delivery of healthcare facilities and other social infrastructure around the world. Among the ways that we can help are:
- Design and build of modular hospitals, schools and other social infrastructure, including supporting infrastructure such as staff areas and accommodation, transport and vehicle access, power generation and auxiliary power supply, perimeter and security, civils and drainage, fire strategy and waste disposal.
- We can advise on the epidemiology of infrastructure: how to design and configure spaces in such a way that social distancing can be maintained and infection risk minimised.
- Programme management and integration, including co-ordination of a Project Management Office (PMO), communications, procurement, commercial and contractual support, health and safety, logistics; also, site identification and assessment, facilities management, equipment and staffing requirements.
- Advice on the use of standardised components and the decommissioning and reuse of assets, to maximise sustainability, efficiency and adaptability.
- We are able to work with the right partners to bring joined-up DfMA solutions to clients, wherever their location. For example, we have joined forces with partners from multiple disciplines to develop a rapidly deployable turnkey solution providing extra 100-bed critical care capacity on permanent hospital sites.
A modular kit of parts
The key to creating infrastructure in a modular way is to build up a standardised ‘kit of parts’ made up of components which can be deployed in a number of configurations to suit the application.
The parts need to be of the right dimensions that they can be manufactured at scale in a factory and transported to site; they must be of sufficient quality to meet a range of standards; and they must be simple enough to allow for rapid construction.
Designers can then use the kit of parts to come up with a limited number of template designs which can be customised to fit individual demands, scale and site circumstances.
As well as speed and efficiency, other advantages of this template approach include reducing the risk profile and optimising learning. Paul Fisher, Principal Consultant at Mott MacDonald who worked on the UK’s COVID-19 NHS surge hospitals programme, says that organic incremental evolution of hospital design from a template allows for continuous improvement, from being, say, 90% right in the earliest edition, to 95% in the next, closing in on perfect in the third iteration, quite possibly in the same year as the first.
“The more modular hospitals are constructed, the more feedback is generated, the greater the learning, the more efficient installation and operation will become,” says Fisher. “We will see economies of scale, benefits to staff mobility, to maintenance and we will greatly increase our capability and capacity to rapidly scale up the healthcare estate to respond to whatever is demanded of it,“ he adds.