Engineering services account for approximately 35-40% of the capital costs in the construction of health care facilities. Given the significance of this investment, NSW Health is seeking to improve the delivery of these services by adopting a more innovative approach to engineering services design. The requirement for all health care design is that it facilitates high quality patient care for the most cost effective capital and recurrent costs.
These Engineering Services and Sustainable Development Guidelines are intended as a handbook to be used during the briefing and design process.
The objectives of this document are:
• To allow the flexibility to facilitate creative/lateral thinking and innovation rather than adopting a prescriptive approach to design.
• To continually achieve better ways of delivering engineering services and sustainable development taking advantage of advances in technology.
• To drive cost efficiency in the provision of engineering services to achieve better value for money.
• To allow for the use of alternative/innovative materials and forms of service provision or designs, rather than being driven by the use of a prescriptive methodology. This then allow designs to be tailored to a particular building.