Introduction
The building design (and construction) process (comprising the planning, building, and maintenance phases) of Health unit facilities is a complex process. Traditionally, the practices and logic employed by the building trade regulate this process with questionable results. One approach that could be used to help avoid the sometimes unfortunate results of such a traditional process is to take advantage of experiences from other branches of industry. However, in order to be successful, this method demands a way of generalizing that will retain the specific details and characteristics of those different branches. This calls for linking the discourse to the ongoing design paradigm and design criteria within the branches involved (Dick, & Stein. 1991).
The restructuring of the Health unit to bring it in line with technical development is also dictated by lack of appropriate personnel resources. This fact will in the future further underline the need for a nontraditional way of organizing the building design process. This will, in turn, affect the services provided by the so-called core business within the Health unit sector, which is mainly carried out by doctors and nurses. The patients' insights regarding medical matters are gradually improving. At the same time, various achievements are taking place in the field of science, such as an accelerating development of computer-based expert systems supported by various distance communications systems (e.g., telemedicine). The patient's role will be transformed in future with patients contributing to a greater extent to the services provided (this process of change might humorously be termed “seeing your doctor by remote control”).
To keep up with this accelerating process of change, new approaches to supplying appropriate building facilities for the core business are needed. This will obviously, in turn, affect various existing and new auxiliary support functions, leading to totally new organizational and technical interfaces being defined...........
