Energy efficiency, resilience and sustainability: A trilemma for hospital buildings?

Abstract

Hospitals are highly interesting buildings; considering their importance for public health and well-being and, it is only reasonable to apply state of the art technological solutions, so as to ensure that the buildings will perform in the expected way, namely, to serve as true health care facilities, with high levels of indoor air quality, thermal, optical and acoustic comfort. Ensuring these conditions comes at significant energy requirements, which made hospitals primary targets for improving their efficiency over the last decades in order to make them more sustainable and also financially viable. However, resilience is a vital quality for hospital buildings which has to be guaranteed and which sets demand both on the building itself and on the infrastructure of energy grids. There are a series of threats to a hospital’s resilience, against which precautionary measures have to be taken, considering the likelihood of the threats and their possible impact on the hospital’s operation. Achieving resilience and sustainability may seem a contradiction at a first glance, but in fact there are more common aspects than competing requirements as it will be discussed in this paper.