The research is made in range of Polisocial Awords 2012/2013 and it is designed to operate in Indian rural context, where the emergency is the lack of Health assistance. India is a huge Country with 17% of global population and 20% of the global burden of diseases. The Indian government allocates only around 4% of total public spending to Health, with the consequence that the vulnerable sections of the Indian population have minimal healthcare protection. Absenteeism of health staff, lack of essential equipment and drugs in remote areas, are other important challenges that limit the provision of healthcare services in terms of availability, access and quality.
The proposed research is focused on developing new healthcare models based on the study of six existing clinics in the extra urban areas out of Kolkata, built by the Npo Project for People and the Ngo Institute for Indian Mother and child (Iimc). They can be classified as Sub Centres: peripheral units available at the village level to provide medical care for the community.
Each Sub Centre is manned by only a pair of health workers, which serves about 5000 persons. They provide only primary treatment as outpatient clinics to between 150 and 800 persons every day but they do not provide emergency care. Despite care giving, they serve an important social role by informing the local population about rules for prevention and sanitary education. Indeed they have a double purpose: curative and educational, to ward off common diseases deriving from insufficient knowledge about hygiene and sanitary regulations.
Challapara Outdoor Clinic
Keyadah Outdoor Clinic_pharmacy Challapara Outdoor Clinic_doctor room
Tegaria Indoor Clinic_lession of hygienical prevention
In addition to the in loco examination of the six clinics, the data have been elaborated also by inspections, evaluation and interviews. The goal is to obtain complete indicators about their planning processes to have a basis on which to design future healthcare structures. The infrastructure of the current facilities has many design issues base on the lack of technical knowledge, for example: the insufficient attention to bioclimatic passive principles, or the inappropriate elements, which could become architectural barriers, and there is also missing documentation about the technology used, as well as architectural features and materials.
The concept of the project will be an autonomous unit, which can provide the first level of medical assistance. It can both promote hygiene education and have a minimum of control into the territory. The medical unit is set up in two different areas: one for health promotion and waiting spaces, and the other for medical examinations; these two functions are separated from storage and toilettes.
The project idea is to design a lightweight technical system, which will be steel load bearing structures, simple to be installed quickly by non-technical personnel. In order of priority, the new planning directions have modern healthcare objectives by using high performance economical steel, and at the same time they should also include local materials for the building’s elements, such as walls, roofing and furnishing, in order to be well established in the geographical context and make it appropriate everywhere in India. Bamboo entirely reflects some requirements, such as flexibility, lightness, facility of assembly, low-cost availability and low-tech implementation. These choices are made to support the progress of education in terms of technical advancement to inform local institution and to promote future independence in construction.
To create different levels of healthcare, the medical units can be joined together achieving more complex systems with the same designed modular spaces. The overall system will be equipped with different elements such as prevention methods, women’s health consulting, baby care, disease screening, injections and immunization against a host of common diseases and pharmacy. Furthermore it will be furnished with appropriated spaces for specialist medical examinations, like dental care, eye specialist, cardiologist and other. Basically it was decided to maintain the same functions of the clinics studied, respecting the original model and establishing continuity between them and the new project.
What the project will increase is the constant possibility of a hospital stay in the overall healthcare system. Instead the new project is conceived to be in constant enlargement to guarantee different levels of care, achievable in different moments. Essentially this research is intended to deliver greater production efficiency; a superior quality of healthcare assistance; a suitable attention to technical aspects and the organizational set up; improve use of local professional resources, and a careful cost control.
