Healthcare Infrastructure, Atlantic Canada

There is a growing demand for healthcare infrastructure across the Atlantic region, but resourcing remains a challenge and construction costs continue to climb. This session will assess how to move forward in the current landscape of project pressures. Panelists will share insights on critical next steps to deepen coordination, collaboration, and innovation.

• Enhancing Emergency Department capacity
  • Expanding Emergency Departments and optimizing design to improve functional flow, patient experience, and responsiveness to current and projected population needs
• Integrating hospital operations with construction
  • Coordinating day-to-day hospital operations with active construction environments to maintain safety, continuity of care, and minimal disruption to clinical services
• Establishing a standardized provincial
  • Developing a consistent, repeatable design and delivery framework that can be applied across healthcare facilities to ensure quality, efficiency, and alignment with system-wide goals

There is immense pressure to improve access to healthcare across Canada, but the resources to build new are not always readily available. This session will explore how to leverage existing spaces to bring care closer to home.

• Assessing opportunities for adaptative reuse of buildings for healthcare services
  • NL Hub
  • IWK Women’s Clinic
• Understanding what is involved from a design/project delivery perspective
  • Identifying and working through some of the challenges presented by spaces that are not purpose built
• Examining examples of adaptative reuse and leased spaces and the impact on community care
• Determining whether these options are financially sustainable

• Examining operational readiness and activation lessons learned from healthcare infrastructure projects across the country
  • Identifying planning pitfalls and how to address them from the outset
• Strategies for working through phased projects

Project 1: Bayers Lake Community Outpatient Centre (Nova Scotia)

Project 2: (PEI) Health Centre

Wayfinding and signage are essential elements of placemaking. The true impact of placemaking is shaped not only by what we see but also by how we feel about our experiences within a space. Wayfinding relies on cognitive functions like problem-solving and decision-making.

However, for many neurodiverse individuals, navigating environments can be especially difficult. In hospitals, emotionally charged and time-sensitive visits often lead to disorientation, confusion, frustration, and stress, which can negatively affect patients’ and visitors’ experiences.

The deeper context of signage and wayfinding is to liberate the act of mobility, to counterbalance the often-confusing contrasts between place and placelessness, seeing everything while seeing nothing.

This presentation will use immersive storytelling case studies to address the following topics:

• The importance of pre-discovery research, co-design and lived experience narratives driving wayfinding and signage master planning
• Being mindful of hubris in designing for disability
• Curating wayfinding and placemaking journey narratives
• The benefits of post-occupancy research
• The integration of donor recognition in healthcare master planning

The built environment disables people, not brains. Neurodiversity describes the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many different ways; there is no one “right” way of thinking, learning, and behaving, and differences are not viewed as deficits. Our current hospitals should be designed to support our diverse population. Too often, brightly-lit, noisy and confusing hospitals create stress and anxiety for people that are seeking care and wellness. A neuroinclusive approach to design can alleviate environmental stressors so that patients can focus on healing and staff can focus on providing the best care possible.

In this presentation we will explore the following aspects of Neuroinclusive design:

• Understanding Neurodiversity
• Data review of why neuroinclusive design is critical in healthcare design today
• The sensory domains and principles of design
• Co-design and the ‘Nothing about us, without us’ movement
• The role of policy and procurement