Enhancing sustainability benefits through green retrofitting of healthcare buildings

Abstract

Green retrofitting practices have critical importance in both the construction industry (CI) and healthcare industry (HI) due to the adverse effects of the existing healthcare buildings on both the environment and public health. Ironically, existing healthcare buildings consume critical amounts of energy, produce wastes, and CO2 emissions, which have considerable diverse harmful impacts on the health and well-being of the society as well as the environment. Especially, given the main goals of healthcare, green retrofitting is crucial to provide a healthy future for patients and staff of healthcare buildings. There is a sensitive link between providing sustainable healthcare buildings with improving health of the patients. Therefore, green retrofitting of healthcare buildings (GRHB) can be seen as one of the significant contributors that have a critical role in reducing the harmful impacts of the existing healthcare buildings. Nowadays, due to coronavirus pandemic, nations will focus on the physical conditions of their healthcare buildings more than ever for strengthening their infrastructure with appropriate retrofitting approaches. Therefore, the worldwide concerns put the prominence of the importance of patient safety and strong health infrastructure on the agenda of nations. Improvements in the health infrastructure are inevitable for the future, and with regarding this motivation, we looked at the benefits of GRHB in the first place. In the existing literature, there is a lack of comprehensive review associated with the GRHB. This paper focuses on conducting a systematic literature review to investigate the benefits of GRHB with selected academic studies. After the identification of healthcare and green retrofitting specific studies, the benefits of GRHB were determined by frequency analysis and classified under four dimensions, which are environmental, economic, social, and functional. Results demonstrated that reduced energy consumption, reduced costs, and improved energy performance of the building are the three major benefits. In terms of healthcare perspective, the critical outcomes of this study as the main benefits differ from other types of green retrofitting projects, which are improved infection control and improved recovery rate. The results of this systematic review will enhance the understanding of the importance of GRHB and its benefits, which will be useful for academics, green building professionals as well as healthcare building providers.