For more than two years, since this pandemic has shaken up our daily lives, our knowledge and our expertise, we have been talking a lot about health, the health network, hospitals, training and the future of young people.
We like to dream of mutations, changes, transformations to face our difficult and unforeseen reality, the challenges of a future that we would like to predict.
Quebec has been able to equip itself with modern hospitals, in line with hospital practices and the technological tools essential to today’s medicine.
Habits from here
It must be recognized that Quebec had hospitals worn out by time and that the importation of a certain architectural know-how developed internationally has greatly contributed to improving habits here.
On the websites of the architecture departments of Quebec universities, despite the recent construction of new exemplary hospitals, future graduates are not offered any specialized master’s degree in hospital architecture. Why weren’t we able to take advantage of the knowledge gained during the design and construction of flagship hospitals such as the new CHUM, the MUHC, the CHU de Québec and hospitals like those of Vaudreuil-Soulanges, Maisonneuve-Rosemont , Sherbrooke, or Baie-Saint-Paul, to name but a few?
Quebec and international experiences
These days, hasn’t the time come to seize the opportunity to set up a reasoned program that would bring together the knowledge drawn from these Quebec experiences and international experiences recognized as innovative to train young architects specializing in this particular field of practice that is hospital architecture?
In this area, technological advances are the sinews of war. Good hospital practices are being reinvented, spaces and architecture must be able to adapt while keeping their significant imprints.
For example, these pandemic times have cruelly taught us that preventing and fighting infections is an essential criterion that has a direct impact on practices, spaces (and their adaptation) and pathways.
Architectural knowledge must be able to be constantly updated, and serve the medical interest, the interest of patients and the public interest. The university melting pot is the best structure to bring together and catalyze this evolving knowledge which can only flourish in interdisciplinarity, with the help of health professionals in a perspective where knowledge beyond borders would be aggregated. Being and staying on the cutting edge of hospital architecture is quite a challenge.
Isn’t Quebec ready to offer such a specialization to its students, a specialization that would advance the planning, definition of programs, design, construction, expansion or renovation of hospitals in Quebec, and that moreover, would place graduates in architecture in a favorable position on the international job market?
An enviable knowledge
Quebec can develop enviable knowledge on the world stage, like Texas A&M University in College Station and several other universities around the world. We have not finished talking about health and hospitals in the coming years.
Isn’t this also the time to assess for the entire health network the physical and functional state of hospitals in view of their ability to deal with other pandemics, which are likely to occur, and to identify all the shortcomings that will need to be corrected?
Offering a specialization in hospital architecture in our universities would be useful for everyone. The return on investment is obviously assured.