A floating hospital… can it be done?
Daring to think from alternative viewpoints
A changing world requires a new way of thinking and acting. Certainly when solving problems. The people in Royal Haskoning BM are very aware of this. A real ‘living room’ has been fixed up in Hoofddorp to give their experts the space to contemplate creative solutions for various problems in relaxed surroundings. Problems are tackled here in a multi-disciplinary context by brainstorming and blue-sky thinking. ‘And it works,’ says Bas van Eijndhoven, a consultant who is also a member of Royal Haskoning’s ‘Innovation Board’. ‘Daring to think about things in conceptually different, broad and creative ways pays off. It provides inspiration and creates building blocks for actual feasible ideas.’
Society is becoming more and more individual and is breaking up into components. People are working more often in and with networks. Royal Haskoning BM has to respond to this development in, for instance, its designs for hospitals. By daring to think ‘outside the box’, we can come up with unlikely ideas that will actually work in practice, says Van Eijndhoven. For example the ex-cruise ship SS Rotterdam, which is now being split up into apartments by a housing corporation, gave him an unusual idea. ‘Climate change and rising sea levels have an enormous impact on our existence. Adaptation is the magic word. Hospitals will have to adapt too. Why not build a hospital in a big ship? A ship isn’t bothered by rising sea levels and can even be moved from its fixed berth fairly easily to another place if a disaster happens there.’
Ship as an icon
‘With a ship as an icon, all of a sudden things can be done that you don’t allow for in your “normal” thinking process,’ explains Van Eijndhoven. ‘The challenges lie in securing the main branches and the offshoots of these kinds of ideas. If you simply dare to consider the possibilities of a hospital on a boat the next question could be: and what if we put it on wheels? Or on rails? You can then start to think about international applications. Say a pandemic breaks out somewhere in the world. You can send a “hospital ship” like that to it. A ship, in fact, is self-supporting and easy to isolate. You can quarantine people in it. By thinking about the process from the concept of—in this case—a mobile hospital, you can learn to think differently about the manner of care provision, flexibility and capacity. In a wider sense you can try to see the possibilities and solutions that might stem from a concept like this. And before you know it you’ve developed a “Healthcare Harbour”...’
Thinking about adaptation
What is considered during creative sessions doesn’t always have to be possible, but it does lead to different, innovative solutions. ‘You learn to let go of old ideas, to look in new directions. And we’re good at that in Royal Haskoning. Using digital whiteboards you can join in the brainstorming and associate with colleagues at a distance, in other branches and in other countries. This very quickly makes cross-pollination possible. At Royal Haskoning we focus our thinking on adaptation and changing circumstances. In the last few years we’ve won three and a half of the five large care sector design competitions we entered…’
Contact: Bas van Eijndhoven
+31 (0)23 5612 971
b.vaneijndhoven@royalhaskoning.com
