Application of green building concept to enhance indoor environmental quality in hospital buildings in Sri Lank

Abstract

Through the number of factors, which can attract the occupants to the building, “quality” gets a predominant situate. Among the other buildings, hospitals are most important place which has to maintain quality in high standard. Hence, most of the countries are initiating various strategies to improve quality of hospitals because, it directly affects to the occupant satisfaction of the hospital. Further, hospital is mostly a public place which is extremely noisy, crowded and less indoor environment quality. It causes serious impacts on patient and staff outcomes ranging from sleep loss and elevates blood pressure among patients to emotional exhaustion and burnout among staff. Henceforth, poorly designed hospital environments pose a serious threat on building occupants. Literature findings further said that in current scenario, the majority of occupants are not satisfied with their indoor environment quality in a hospital. Nowadays, most of hospitals are following various strategies to improve quality of indoor environment. Among those strategies, green building concept becomes most prominent which is easy to adapt to improve the indoor environment quality. Moreover, green hospital design has been linked to better patient outcomes and staff retention. Even though, in past few years many newly constructed and renovated buildings moved towards green, buildings in hospital sector in Sri Lanka has not much familiar with the green building concept. Therefore, this study is mainly focused on presenting the importance of applying green building concept in hospital buildings to improve indoor environmental quality. Two case studies consisting private and public hospitals were conducted to collect the data. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted who have caught up in operational and maintenance management process of selected hospitals. As revealed by research findings, there was no special attention to enhance indoor environment quality in Sri Lankan hospitals especially in public sector. Therefore, several issues were identified comply with the indoor air quality, thermal comfort, acoustic comfort, visual comfort and spatial comfort. Indoor Air quality is one of the major challenges faced by many hospital buildings as it creates several issues within hospital environment. Accordingly, probable green strategies were proposed to overcome identified indoor environment quality issues in hospital buildings to facilitate high quality indoor environment for building occupants in hospital buildings in Sri Lanka.