Determining and Prioritizing Effective Design Indicators in COVID-19 Pandemic Response

Abstract

Babak Fakhim42744 and Zahra Jahed Bozorgan42745*

Background and aim: In 2020, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for hospital beds in the intensive care unit has increased in a short time, but design protocols to prevent COVID-19 transmission do not yet exist, and architects are trying to make spatial changes to use protocols for other infectious diseases such as Ebola and tuberculosis.

Methods and results: In this article, we first compare the health infrastructure of Iran and other countries and examine the effect of these facilities on the control of this disease. Then, by collecting solutions of health care systems in successful countries, COVID-19 was controlled and finally, by collecting information obtained from previous researches, by conducting a questionnaire, these cases were tested. We go by specialists. The reliability of the questionnaire was calculated by calculating Cronbach’s alpha coefficient through retesting and correlation coefficient. The questionnaire was given to ten respondents two weeks apart, which the reliability coefficient obtained in two runs was higher than 1.19 and showed the high reliability of the research tool. Of the total number of respondents (54), 6 physicians (11.1%), 15 architects (hospital designers) (28.8%), 14 mechanical engineers (25.9%) and 19 civil engineers (hospital contractors) (35.2%). After collecting the data, the Shannon entropy method was used to weight the criteria. Then, the data is analyzed using the TOPSIS technique in Excel 2013 software.

Conclusion: The results show that future approaches in designing medical centers will be based on the axes of flexibility design, increasing hospital capacity, improving the prevention of infection, and changing the design approach of the hospital from short-term stay to community-based care.