There’s more to facilities planning than selecting textiles and furniture. This nuanced field is charged with planning for a future they can’t see. Understanding how to navigate the unknowns can set the facilities planner up for success.
Facilities of the Future
“Keep your eyes out on the horizon and look out ahead,” advises Angelique Kennison, Director of Regional Clinical Planning at Maine Health. “A few months ago, I was at a conference and happened to sit next to a former fighter pilot. She shared with me that anytime she became overwhelmed with the noise and stimuli right in front of her, her mentor would remind her to stay focused on the horizon. And that focus and taking that long view is so essential to strategic planning.”
Keeping your eyes on the horizon can help you design for the future of your community’s needs. The facility must be flexible and agile and nimble for the future, so it meets all of a community’s needs. “This is important as we look to the future and having a space that encourages access and safety and innovation,” notes Kennison.
Consider how the space can better meet the needs of the staff and patients so it can reach its full potential. Kennison recalls, “I think that’s something we really learned during the pandemic, that we need to be a lot more nimble and able to adapt on the fly.” Today’s data and experience inform the future needs of your facility.
One Size Fits One
Facilities planning doesn’t have one perfect template for every health system and every location. Al Green, Vice President of Planning and Business Development at Maine Health, discusses the process they use for their locations. Each scenario has its own unique challenges.
“One is a pre-pandemic sort of tertiary medical center example,” he says. “The other is a post-pandemic rural health center example, trying to compare and contrast the nuances of those two examples and emphasizing some of the foundational aspects of the planning process. They don’t change, they’re consistent between the two environments, but also recognizing that, once you’ve done one facility plan, you’ve really only done one facility plan. Every environment, every community is so different, that often the needs drive some special nuances in the way that the facility looks and feels once it’s done.”
He also warns that you can’t sketch out a plan and call it finished. Green notes, “The toughest thing about building a strategy is that once it’s done and you put it on paper, it’s out of date. Variables are constantly changing, and you need to update it always. As you’re putting it together and once you’re revisiting it, keep that in mind.”
Your best bet for planning success is to ask questions. Kennison shares, “I think one of the most important things a strategic planner can do is listen very intently in the rooms they’re in, ask really good questions and get the group of folks you’re with to keep thinking out ahead. Because we’re not having all these conversations to just meet immediate demands right in front of our faces. And if we are able to get folks to really lean into that, we’re going to be successful. A framework to think through all of this and ask the hard questions, ask the right questions, ask the questions people are afraid to ask, because we don’t know the answers, but it gets us thinking in a forward trajectory in an important way to be able to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish here.”
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Al Green
Vice President of Planning and Business Development at Maine Health |
Angelique Kennison Director of Regional Clinical Planning at Maine Health |
Learning More
- Register ASAP for SHSMD Connections 2022 in-person conference September 11-14 in the DC area to attend this breakout session, “Designing for the Post-Pandemic Future: Modernizing Space to Promote Safety, Efficiency, and Agility”.
- To hear more from Angelique Kennison and Al Green, click here to listen to their recent SHSMD Rapid Insights podcast episode which serves as a preview of their presentation topic at this year’s SHSMD Connections conference September 10-14.