Today the Ministry of Health and PAHO began the initial stages of the implementation of the SMART Healthcare Facilities Initiative. The initiative is designed to ensure that hospitals and healthcare providers implement energy saving strategies to make them more cost efficient. We spoke to Douglas Westby, the Technical Advisor the National Engineering and Maintenance Center, for more about the project...
Douglas Westby
"We have a health sector strategic plan and part of it is to improve infrastructure and we have chosen to use the smart hospital initiative as our standard for hospitals."
Alex Courtenay, 7News
"So by using these initiatives and standards, what is the benefit...?"
Douglas Westby
"If our hospitals are smart which we intend them to be, the hospitals would be able to resists the effects of climate change and we would be able to improve healthcare services and save money on things like electricity and water."
Alex Courtenay, 7News
"So it goes to the maintenance of hospitals in general?"
Douglas Westby
"What we are doing right now since we already have the hospitals, we need to retrofit them so that they are in line with the standard and once we do that we are going to be measuring the results to see how - it's a before and after type of thing."
Alex Courtenay, 7News
"We understand that there are certain stakeholders involved that had to go to training in order to begin this process."
Douglas Westby
"Yesterday we did a baseline assessment training and we invited mostly engineers to participate in the training because we realize that we are going to need to hire some of them to actually do some of the work for us and we wanted them to understand what we are doing, because it's a new initiative and most of them are not familiar with it. So what we did yesterday was we got someone to give them and overview including some people from the Ministry of Health. We have them an idea of what we wanted from them in assessing the facilities. The assessment has to do with looking at what we have and making recommendations and what we need to do to get it up to standard."
"Its 4 areas. We are looking at the green aspects of the hospital, to see how well they deal with energy and waste disposal and water usage. We are looking at the structure of the hospital, so how well they are able to deal with things like hurricane and so."
"We are looking at functional aspects, how well we are able to deliver our services and we are looking at non-structural aspects. Everything apart from structural aspects; the design of the doors, air conditioning systems and things like that."
Westby told us that he hopes that all of Belize's main, regional hospitals will benefit from the SMART project in the next few years.
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