Part Two - Office of Construction and Facilities Management

The case studies should explicitly link service-life, investment horizon, and
degree of change readiness.
A modest investment would provide VA with a baseline of information on which to
make decisions on investing in enhancing facility capacity to accommodate future
change as it occurs. This could accomplish several things: reduce operating
costs, down time, and disruption; extend the useful life of VA hospitals; and allow
change to occur in a more efficient way so that optimum functional relationships
could be preserved.
Along with establishing a baseline for change in VA facilities, VA should do an
audit of facilities, both nationally and internationally that claim to be designed to
accommodate change. 12 This should include not only new facilities, but also
older facilities that have actually experienced a good deal of change. Both the
consequences on operations and the cost should be well documented. VA would
then have a state-of-the-art profile upon which judgments can be made as to
future VA facility design. Then VA can decide whether to push the boundaries
further in terms of designing facilities to accommodate change.
Recommendation B, Avoiding Premature Obsolescence: Develop a plan
for addressing how VA hospitals and ambulatory facilities can more
effectively avoid premature obsolescence.
Reducing premature but differential obsolescence is important to the future
development of VA’s building infrastructure.
“Obsolescence,” the condition of being antiquated, old fashioned, or out of date,
results when there is a change in the requirements or expectations regarding the
shelter, comfort, profitability, or other dimensions of performance that a building
or building subsystem is expected to provide. Obsolescence may occur because
of functional, economic, technical, or social and cultural change.
“Design service life” is the period of time over which a building or a building
subsystem or component (such as the roof, mechanical equipment, plumbing, or
sheathing) is designed to provide at least an acceptable minimum level of shelter
or service as defined by the owner. It typically depends on assumptions,
sometimes implicit, regarding satisfactory completion of normal maintenance
activities. A facility or subsystem may have an idealized service life based on
expectations.
12 The recently opened Martini Ziekenhuis in Groeningen, the Netherlands, is recommended as a
best practice case study. It incorporates many strategies to accommodate change, including
100% movable walls. Also recommended is the Mayo Clinic’s Gonda Building. Another is the INO
Hospital in Bern, Switzerland, which used the Systems Separation approach in its procurement
and design. The Open Building/System Separation procurement method is further discussed in
Chapter 7 Building Acquisition, Recommendation A.
FINAL DRAFT Part 2-17
June 2009