Healthcare operations, waste and logistics
Helping healthcare providers future-proof logistical challenges
Operational waste and logistics are critical issues for healthcare. Organisations must work to ensure patient safety and wellbeing, to offer efficiency of operations, and to meet sustainability and net zero targets.
With new technologies and operational models being delivered to support patient centred care, how can we ensure new hospital designs incorporate them? How can we retrofit existing healthcare assets to maximise efficiencies in highly complex operational environments? How can hospitals reduce the significant costs associated with waste and logistics while maintaining effectiveness?
A comprehensive plan for effective, efficient materials management and handling in hospitals will ensure high levels of patient safety and positive clinical outcomes, low servicing costs, peak efficiency, removal of logjams and maximising sustainability performance. Hospitals and healthcare sites are a growth area. As populations age and needs increase, the need for effective healthcare operations grow significantly.
Our healthcare operations, waste and logistics assessment services
- Auditing and evaluating waste and logistics operations
- Stakeholder and data evaluation
- Architectural design support
- Strategy development for healthcare facilities
- Review and analysis of innovative technologies
- Pneumatic disposal system space planning
- Auto Guided Vehicle design integration
Our work will support:
Patient wellbeing
Effective logistical and waste flows are critical to ensure patient wellbeing. As such, we believe that proper consideration of these flows is critical in the development of an operational strategy and the design of a hospital. Adequate provision for clean, hygienic and efficient goods delivery and waste management flows ensures that staff skills are used where they are most needed.
Future-proofing and adapting to change
We understand the needs of clients in the healthcare sector. Critical to this is the importance of talking to clinical staff to achieve successful, safe and efficient implementation of hospital operations.
Project highlights
Heatherwood Hospital
Ascot, Berkshire UK
In March 2022, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust opened Heatherwood Hospital, Ascot, following a £98m redevelopment aimed at refocusing the building on dealing with outpatients.
Buro Happold provided a simulation service for the redevelopment. The focus was on both people and material flows, to help clinical and operational leaders explore the most efficient ways of using the redeveloped building for the benefit of patients.
Landspitali Hospital
Reykjavik, Iceland
Landspitali Hospital is the largest hospital in Iceland. Buro Happold developed the hospital campus’ waste and linen vacuum collection system and designed an audio-guided vehicle (AGV) goods distribution system.
Our people flow analysis contributed to the creation of a hospital that has user experience at its heart. Our team planned spaces that consider both how to deliver an exceptional level of care while keeping the well-being of its patients central to its design.
The Hospital of the Future
Buro Happold was part of an international design team with architect OMA that explored the question- what should the hospital of tomorrow be? Our teams provided multidisciplinary engineering and consulting services. This included the development of a prototype for the Hospital of the Future.
The prototype embraces the potential of automation and digitisation to reduce the burden on hospital support staff. It provides a digital platform into which any digital services provider can connect. The super-fast automated goods and waste system, for example, removes the need for manual handling of goods and waste, and also enables on-demand delivery.
