EndoPro Magazinecover story: If you are thinking about expanding, relocating or renovating your endoscopy center or department, there are several key space planning concepts, regulatory requirements, trends, options and features that should be considered before anyone puts pen to paper or sets a project budget.
Given the impact that the current pandemic has had on the ability for many endoscopists to see patients and the use of some endoscopy centers for surge capacity, pandemic resiliency should also be factored into the planning.
Click the cover image for the full article by John Fowler, AIA, EDAC, LEED AP, Healthcare Studio leader at Margulies Perruzzi.
For more information and photos of 50 Staniford Street, property featured in this article, click here.
MP recently published “VOLUME 1: COVID-19 AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORKPLACE
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?” Download by clicking here.
We have news to report. The data is in on business trends for the annual Interior Design Rising Giants, the 100 largest firms after our top 100 Giants. However, there’s a catch: It’s 2020. Which means our entire world is in various stages of flux—actually, upheaval may be a better word. No one knows what will happen next week, let alone next year. So while these new numbers can give you a fine idea of what kind of year the Rising Giants had in 2019, all bets are off on guessing how the design industry and the economy overall will weather the rest of 2020 and beyond.
As the stay-at-home mandates are lifted, corporate America is evaluating how to maintain safety measures within their current office space. From rearranging furniture to implementing one-way traffic flow patterns, and providing additional cleaning supplies, tenants and landlords are looking at office spaces and office cultures like never before. But are corporate offices equipped with the right infrastructure to support these changes? More specifically, do our office spaces and buildings have the means to store hazardous materials in abundance? Alcohol Based Hand Sanitizers are often a Class III flammable liquid and their use and storage are regulated by the Massachusetts building code.
Local building and fire codes regulate the maximum quantity of hazardous materials allowed in a building. We’ve taken a closer look at the code implications of increasing hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies in office spaces and recommend developing a Hazardous Materials Management Plan (HMMP) (or update the existing plan) to incorporate any additional hand sanitizer and ensure compliance with these provisions. These plans are also critical to the local fire department and other emergency response teams as the plans will provide the necessary information for fire-fighting and emergency response operations. A chemical inventory including type and quantity of hazardous materials should be maintained by each tenant. We recommend landlords revisit lease agreements and consider adding language to address storage of hazardous materials and to define allowed quantities for each tenant space. Communication between tenants and landlords is critical to maintain compliance and life safety requirements for the building occupants.
Jason B. Costello AIA, EDAC, is a Partner | Associate Principal and leads the Healthcare design practice at Margulies Perruzzi.
More information and articles published from the MP Healthcare studio posted regularly.
MP recently published “VOLUME 1: COVID-19 AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORKPLACE
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?” Download by clicking here.
Across the country, we are seeing numerous changes at healthcare facilities as they reopen for elective and non-critical care while still addressing potential surge capacity issues related to COVID-19. One of the biggest difficulties is getting into and through these facilities while practicing social distancing and minimizing risk to patients and staff.
MP’s John Fowler, AIA, EDAC, LEED AP, is featured in Healthcare Design – Healthcare facilities are employing a variety of strategies and tactics, including technology, to overcome the challenges of reopening amid COVID-19. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3iZms9r
The other night I had the opportunity to share with the architecture community some tools and recommendations on how to work remotely through a webinar hosted by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA). We were asked to participate as we’ve been incorporating remote working into our workflow for a number of years already so were fairly well prepared to transition our entire staff to remote working when the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated it.
We had initially set up a virtual private network (VPN) on our firewall to create a secure connection for people that needed flexibility to work from home when they had family obligations to attend to during the business day. When the winter of 2015 delivered back-to-back snowstorms every weekend, we increased access and encouraged more staff to connect and have productive days despite the snow-covered streets.
To ensure the security of our client’s project data, everything is stored on our network. When connecting in, the same security and virus protection software we use in the office is installed on the users’ home computer. Over the past couple weeks, we have had our staff test their home connections to ensure that if the time came to work remotely full-time, we would all be prepared. We scheduled a stress test on the system to track how much bandwidth was used to better understand any limits that could affect our productivity.
Along with the hardware testing, we started encouraging all staff to practice communicating internally with Skype for Business, even if the person was within talking distance. We selected Skype because we have about a dozen of our millennial staff who have been using it and they could help share their knowledge with others to facilitate the implementation and it had already been installed with our recent Office 365 upgrades.
Change is tough. Making major changes in how we work and the technology we use are especially tough when your staff encompasses several generations. We wanted to be cautious about making too many new moves when it is already a stressful time. Choosing platforms where staff could get help from others internally was intentional. While we have external IT support, now more than ever, it’s important to encourage supporting each other.
For the generation of staff (and clients) that prefer face-to-face connections, we increased our licenses so that video conferencing is available to anyone who wants to use it. Our internal message board has become an active place to share information on both what is working well and what has had some challenges. Where we have found gaps that needed a new format for remote working, we have started using new platforms. The underlying theme here is to be open to provide alternate solutions that support how people prefer to work and having open communication.
At the close of the webinar we were asked to share our key takeaways. We had covered lots of technical information, costs and comparisons of software and hardware, work methods, communication tools, but my takeaway was much simpler than all of that. Everyone at MP genuinely loves what they do, and we enjoy doing the work we do WITH each other. We need to reinforce these basic principles while we are working away from one another. We need to remind ourselves of the importance of this human connection. It is not just about being connected to share our work and collaborate with one another, but it is equally important to continue to share our lives with one another.
Architecture Firms and Remote Work’ was a virtual program hosted by the Boston Society of Architects on March 17. The free program welcomed over 375 members of the architectural community from across the country. The recording of this program is available for viewing at www.architects.org
