Reducing hospital cost through design. An international collaboration project

The article focus on the issue about cost containment in hospital buildings and describes an international project launched in 2014 in Florence, thanks to the intuition of prof. Romano del Nord, professor of architecture at the University of Florence and director of the TESIS Inter-University Research Center. The project involved members of the International Hospital Federation (IHF) and of the International Union of Architect-Public Health Group (UIA-PHG). The project started in Florence, where the TESIS center organized an international workshop in 2014 to discuss the question of how to reduce the costs of construction, management and maintenance of hospital buildings through better design. For this reason it was been necessary since starting the project, to involve managerial representatives, hospital staff, architects, technicians and engineers, in other word all representatives generally involved during the life cycle of an hospital building. After the workshop in Florence, many meetings were held in other country on the occasion of international conferences, like in Geneva, during the Healthcare Forum (2016), Durban-South Africa, during the IHF conference (2016), in Manila-Philippines, during the IHF conference (2017), in Paris, at the UIA-PHG conference (2018). This article is written using notes left by prof. Romano Del Nord and the contributions of the experts involved in the project.