Hospitals in KW

[ijmorlan]

London's Health Services Campus is about 40 acres plus another 40 acres for longer-term residential programs.  The site includes the main hospital building (really an agglomeration of the main hospital and the children's hospital plus various additions).  The surrounding campus includes surface and structured parking, the helipade, and supporting buildings.

Hospitals have many uses which relate to each other to different extents. Emergency, maternity, surgery, outpatient, and long term care and others are all distinct functions which have varying degrees of interconnection. They do not need to be all at the same site. It’s more important to have multiple emergency locations accessible to different parts of the city than to have everything in the same building.

I would go further and suggest that resilience requires that the hospital be at multiple sites. Combined with the transport requirements, it simply does not make sense to insist on one huge site. If they really need 60 acres, build 4 hospitals at different locations with different functions (except maybe Emergency at all of them).

And that is before even considering the fact that by using multiple floors you can put a shocking amount of floor space on an existing parking lot. The new hospital does not have to be built like a suburban strip mall.