Design
Hospitals: Planning, Design and Management
by G. D. Kunders, S. Gopinath, Asoka Katakam
Hospitals: Planning, Design and Management summary
Hospitals: Planning, Design and Management (Tata McGraw-Hill, 1998) is a healthcare-facility planning text associated with G. D. Kunders, S. Gopinath, and Asoka Katakam. Library and WorldCat records identify the 1998 New Delhi edition as a 424-page work concerned with hospital planning, design and construction, administration, health facilities, and architectural plans. The book sits at the intersection of architecture and operations: a hospital must support clinical care, patient and staff movement, equipment, utilities, logistics, infection-control needs, administration, and long-term management within one continuously operating facility. This Booknomics analysis focuses on those planning relationships and treats all technical dimensions, building codes, clinical standards, and engineering specifications as edition- and jurisdiction-dependent rather than timeless rules.
Key ideas
A hospital is an operating system expressed in space. Departments, circulation, utilities, staff workflows, patient journeys, materials, and equipment have to be coordinated rather than designed as isolated rooms. Planning begins with service demand. Bed numbers, outpatient load, emergency activity, diagnostics, surgery, critical care, maternity, and support services translate into space and infrastructure requirements. Department adjacency affects efficiency and safety. Frequently connected services should reduce unnecessary travel while incompatible flows should be separated. Circulation is multi-layered. Patients, visitors, staff, emergency movement, supplies, food, linen, waste, and bodies may need different routes or controlled intersections. Clinical technology shapes architecture. Equipment, power, medical gases, ventilation, data, shielding, maintenance access, and future replacement influence room size and service distribution. Support departments are part of care delivery. Sterilization, pharmacy, stores, kitchens, laundry, engineering, housekeeping, waste management, and administration keep clinical areas functional. Flexibility matters because medicine changes. Buildings must accommodate new technologies, altered care models, service expansion, and renovation without shutting down critical operations. Management should influence design before construction. Staffing, maintenance, operating cost, infection control, and workflow consequences are easier to address in planning than after occupancy. Site planning affects internal performance. Ambulance access, public arrival, service delivery, parking, expansion zones, utilities, and disaster access need coordinate…
Practical application
Patient-journey map: Trace one patient type—emergency, outpatient, surgical, or inpatient—from arrival through every department and support interaction. Flow-conflict audit: On a hospital plan, use separate lines for public, patient, staff, supply, waste, and emergency movement and mark avoidable intersections. Expansion test: Identify where one major department could grow without blocking critical circulation or shutting down essential services.