DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY

SMART-H: SMART-Health-care facilities towards resilient, green, and sustainable medical systems.

Project disclaimer

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Description

SMART-H is the first step towards establishing SMART (e.g., resilient, sustainable, and green) Health-care facilities in Malawi and ensure continuity of operations of critical services before, during and after disasters and health crises to promote better community health and provide better services for patients and staff. A novel roadmap for stakeholders will be implemented to assess the adequacy of existing healthcare facilities and establish the selection criteria to identify those facilities eligible for mitigation strategies. It will provide an informed pathway on how government, business and society should intervene to prepare medical facilities to meet global standards and respond to disruptive events. The novel concept of this research consists of creating an integrated analysis framework to i) assess multi-hazards by probabilistic analyses, ii) identify medical baselines (e.g., health-care building types with similar structural and architectural features) on a variety of parameters collected through field investigations, iii) develop dynamic structural and thermal models to assess the physical and energy performance, and estimate direct and indirect losses and health and wellbeing of people associated with disasters driven by climate change for prioritising vulnerable baselines, iv) recommend mitigation strategies and optimize them using life-cycle approaches to reduce CO2 and improve energy efficiency, and v) produce cost-benefit analyses to plan mitigation investments for reducing future impact from multi-hazard-risks and health crises. This work will deliver a dataset, which will encourage stakeholders to take risk-informed and inclusive decisions at local, regional, and national level and promote medical facility renovations. The results will demonstrate that multi-disciplinary research is crucial to prioritise the extent and nature of repair of medical facilities. Depending on the policymakers' primary concerns different pathways should be considered to improve multi-hazard preparedness and response to health emergencies and disasters. To maximise the impact of the proposed research, a workshop in Malawi will be delivered to illustrate the potential of the proposed strategies amongst policy makers and industries operating in health emergency planning and response. This will create additional drive across sectors for financial initiatives and alternatives for inclusive healthcare. Dissemination of the research will be through publications in high profile journals and key conferences in this field.

Objectives

SMART-H aims to tackle the present and future risks driven by climate changes in Malawi and other countries in East Africa developing a pathway to respond to unexpected disasters and health crises via a new roadmap. This will be implemented with scope to design mitigation plans for health facilities through 3 main strategies aimed at 1) strengthening building resilience to guarantee continuity of operations before, during and after an emergency 2) promoting green engineering interventions to reduce carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency while ensuring indoor thermal performance and 3) encouraging the use of sustainable solutions to contribute to high quality care and accessibility of services, help reduce facility costs and ensure better affordability. To this scope, Malawi and the UK will work in partnership to develop a multi-dimensional roadmap and address the health challenges with only one top priority: repair vulnerable medical systems to create smart health facilities. This will enable health facilities to become resilient, sustainable, and green, affording Malawi and its communities an improved response to emergencies. Specifically, the research objectives are five-fold: 1. Select and assess the hazard scenario which will be adopted with the exposure to identify the location of health facilities damaged in the past catastrophic events and existing health facilities at risk from current and future disasters driven by climate change. 2. Identify medical facility baselines, by selecting from groups of representative building types inspected on site, medical facility attributes (e.g., buildings' structural or architectural features) which will define the baseline and will be required in the analysis and the mitigation planning phases. 3. Implement dynamic structural and thermal modelling to assess physical vulnerability and energy performance of medical systems and prioritize medical systems at risk and eligible for mitigation. 4. Recommend feasible mitigation solutions according to human and economic loss estimation, thermal comfort, and energy consumption and optimize those solutions by minimizing life-cycle carbon footprint and improving energy efficiency through integrated life-cycle approaches. 5. Create smart health facilities through informed investments for i) strengthening, repair and maintenance, ii) upgrading systems (e.g., water/hygiene, electricity, and emergency) to the minimum required standards, and iii) increasing energy efficiency and achieving carbon neutrality.

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Location

The country, countries or regions that benefit from this Programme.

Malawi

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