The art and science of designing a hospital anywhere is a complex affair. Beyond technical requirements that modern medicine demands and rigid functional relationships between different medical departments, the designer has to cope with a host of more subjective issues like the anxiety of the patient, the stressful work environment of the staff and the need to build a sustainable and healing building; Hippocrates’ injunction to the medical community being, “First, do no harm.”
Healthcare in India is in a developing stage and it needs a radical policy shift at government level to usher in the
changes to face the challenges of the future.
Under the umbrella of health care providers are outpatient set-ups, nursing homes, hospitals, medical colleges, health spas, centers, ayurvedic and naturopathy centers, hospices, old age homes and more. Most of these institutions will have varied needs, which will differ vastly in terms of their planning needs.
Health care provision in India is different in rural and semi urban settings where it is more
unorganized to today’s super specialty centers where it more institutionalized.
The sector suffers from long years of
neglect by the government in terms of priority funding despite being a basic need of the community. The
mechanisms for funding are fast changing to the private sector involvement thereby pushing up the cost of both
setting up hospitals as well as availing health care in these hospitals.
The lowering of interest rates over the years
has no doubt helped the cause of the private sector wherein more entrepreneurs are coming forward to set up
hospitals as it has become affordable to take loans and repay them. The rapid growth of the insurance sector is
equally helping the community to face the problem of spiraling health care costs.
