Part Two - Office of Construction and Facilities Management

• Incorporate opportunities for assuring a higher degree of building system
performance in the design, construction, and operation of new VA
facilities.
• Analyze opportunities for retrofitting existing VA facilities with high
performance building systems.
• Specifically consider systematic approaches to the renovation of
specialized areas in VA hospitals.
• Implement and test reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) pilot programs
for selected VA healthcare facility types and operations.
• Develop, test, and assess operational commissioning programs for
optimizing operations at a range of VA healthcare delivery and facility
types.
• Develop, test, and assess recommissioning and retrocommissioning
programs for the existing VA portfolio of healthcare facilities.
Each supporting activity is detailed below. In addition, the committee
recommends that each organizational element involved in evaluation of facility
operation and maintenance decision-making identify and describe specific
performance metrics and data requirements for all its activities.
Recommendation A, New Building System Performance: Incorporate
opportunities for assuring a higher level of building system performance in
the design, construction, adaptation, and operation of new VA facilities.
This recommendation applies to all facilities serving all levels of patient care and
acuity in the VA system. The following are recommended as considerations in
upgrading VA standards to achieve this goal.
• Incorporating the performance goal of accommodating future alterations
with minimum disruption and cost. For example, components of the
mechanical or electrical system that cannot be economically or physically
changed should be sized for a range of activities, a previously agreed to
set of performance criteria that would accommodate more than the initial
spatial configuration.
• Add a level of performance specificity to current VA standards for all
building systems, including their maintenance. For example, current VA
standards say, “steam traps shall be readily available for ease of
maintenance.” This language seems self-explanatory but does not offer
any specifics for what ease of maintenance means or what readily
available means. Such instructions should be tied to a specific test
procedure or a specific set of design requirements that define availability
and ease of maintenance.
• In the selection of materials, specifically consider their maintenance and
cleaning requirements.
FINAL DRAFT Part 2-27
June 2009