The recent pandemic context has brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of the medical systems around the world, while recent fire accidents in Romanian hospitals in cities such as Bucharest or Piatra Neamt have only worsened the situation, underlining the lack of both responsibility and investments in public hospital infrastructure.
Many more hospital vulnerabilities will continue to surface in the next period, given the pandemic and especially the intensive care units – ICU (ATI) are highly exposed, says Raluca Soaita, founder of Tesseract Architecture, the single architecture company specialized in the healthcare sector and one of the few that operate in CEE.
“An intensive care unit needs to be equipped with special networks. Treated air and pressure differences must be used. This is very difficult to implement in the existing hospital buildings because of their initial structure,” says Raluca Soaita in a dialogue with BUCHAREST REAL ESTATE CLUB.
“Many of the Romanian hospital buildings were not initially designed for this purpose,” added Raluca, also saying that most of the local hospitals are forced to function with electrical and gas installations that were improvised as additions to the initial structure of the buildings. “All these improvisations expose the buildings and patients to a high fire and epidemiological risk. Many of the public hospitals are deteriorated and more problems will appear in the near future.” the architect ads.
With the recent pandemic having put high pressure on the public hospitals` capacity to treat other affections than Covid-19, the private health system remains the patients` single alternative. With the new young urban generation opting more and more for private healthcare services, due to their improved quality and patient quality treatment, this sector will continue to generate high demand, says Raluca Soaita. “The existing private health clinics keep on sustained rhythm of growth in the recent years – our client Medlife announced 8% business growth in Q3 2020) and we believe that the need for medical infrastructure will keep growing in the next years, considering the still limited offer on the market,” says the architect.
Tesseract Architecture is a multi-disciplinary studio of architects operating across three divisions: medical architecture, commercial architecture and 3D animation. The healthcare architecture division of Tesseract is specialized in creating patient – centric designs for clinics and hospitals, with important projects in their portfolio, such as the Modular Hospital in Brasov, Sibiu County Hospital, the Modulal Hospital for Covid – 19 pandemic at Elias Hospital in Bucharest or the extension of the Children Clinical Emergency Hospital Marie Curie /Daruieste Viata.
One of few healthcare specialized studios that operate in CEE, Tesseract Medical has delivered creative concepts for both very large and smaller facilities and involves an extensive multi-disciplinary team in approaching a medical project, such as sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, epidemiologists to name just a few.