Medical/Welfare Facilities

When designing, we also focus on encouraging staff to communicate. We encourage interaction with staff from different professions and promote interprofessional collaboration. To this end, staff commons (bases for interaction, breaks, and conferences) will be created in key locations such as outpatient clinics and hospital wards to improve staff amenities and create a Magnet Hospital*4 that also considers well-being*3.

*3 It means not only good physical health, but also a state of well-being "in which everything is fulfilled physically, mentally, and socially."
*4 An attractive hospital where nurses feel fulfilled in their work and where nurses are attracted and retained.

Hospital buildings consume a lot of energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and have a particularly large impact on the environment, so they must have functions that take the global environment into consideration. We propose hospitals that reduce life-cycle costs through the efficient use of energy and natural energy using our "environmental integration technology "*5, which also enables them to obtain ZEB certification*6 and LEED certification*7.

*5 ISHIMOTO's original design method. We position buildings on the basis of continuity with the environment, transcend the boundaries of design, structure, and environmental facilities sections, and collaborate flexibly with experts and engineers from diverse fields of expertise both inside and outside the company to realize architecture that is compatible with the environment.
*6 Abbreviation for Net Zero Energy Building. It is a building that aims to achieve a comfortable indoor environment while reducing the annual primary energy balance consumed by the building to zero.
*7 It is an environmental performance evaluation system for built environments (buildings and urban environments) that is widely used around the world.

The future medical and welfare environment will face a variety of challenges, including population decline, super-aging society, response to emerging infectious diseases, declining workforce and work style reform, unexpected natural disasters, advances in medical technology and equipment, environmental issues, rising construction costs, medical and welfare DX and AI, and privacy considerations. We believe that the time has come to look to the future, as there are many issues that relate to the fundamentals of the way medical and welfare architecture has been conducted to date. We believe that our mission is to solve these problems and create the future.
We will work with you to create the medical and welfare architecture of the future through flexible design while responding to changes in the environment surrounding the medical and welfare field.

We have medical business consultants on staff and can propose from both a structural and non-structural perspective based on our extensive experience in planning, designing, and supervising medical and welfare facilities. We want to be a partner that can be trusted like a "home doctor" to provide a full range of services, from planning, conception, and proposal to basic design, implementation design, supervision, and post-construction maintenance.

The construction industry's labor shortage and work style reforms, as well as soaring material prices, currency exchange rates, and disputes, have caused construction costs to skyrocket, making it difficult to build within budget. However, it is not a good idea to reduce medical and welfare functions or the quality of buildings in order to cut costs. We propose ways to reduce costs without reducing functionality or quality. For example, we will look for ways to reduce costs without reducing necessary functions, such as reducing exterior wall and roof area by creating a shaped and simple building form, and reducing common area by minimizing corridor lengths through appropriate room layout. We will also propose ways to reduce costs without compromising the quality of the building, such as by reducing the amount of excavated soil generated during construction and by devising the use of the site.

In order to realize the reconstruction of the hospital within a planned budget, we also propose a method of ordering. One of the ordering methods is the ECI method. The ECI method is a method in which a technical cooperator (persons with the right of priority negotiation: builder) is selected at the completion stage of basic design. The advantage is that cost reduction through VE *8 and shorter construction period can be achieved at the same time by receiving technical cooperation from a builder at the implementation design stage. In addition, because costs can be largely determined prior to the start of implementation design, the risk of unsuccessful bids and resulting delays in the start of construction in the conventional method can be mitigated. We have experience in three public hospitals and two private hospitals, and will use this experience to rebuild to realize reconstruction within a planned budget.

*8 VE stands for value engineering. The goal is to increase functionality and value at a low cost.