Redefining the Community Hospital: a Small Town Approach to Medical Planning and Design

Abstract

Rural hospitals in America hold a critical position within their communities because they possess the duty and responsibility of not only providing adequate healthcare services for the population, but also bearing the heavy burden of functioning as one of the main socio-economic engines within the area. These factors, along with drastically inadequate operating budgets, often create programmatic and operational challenges for these entities to confront as they fight to provide the technologically current facilities and services needed to adequately care for their community. All of this must be done in the most cost effective way possible. This thesis will look at current trends being administered within the widespread replacement effort of these facilities, and propose several alternative strategies aimed at facilitating feasible solutions to these and other issues that are not currently being addressed. Design resolution strategies will be formulated and tested. These will then be directly implemented through a specific project design exercise that will then be evaluated.