5 minute read
Building a healthy future
Putting health at the heart of infrastructure is key to building a healthy future, says Richard Cantlay, Mott MacDonald Global Health Portfolio Leader
The pandemic has had an unexpected consequence in that it has focused our minds on how and where we live. We have become acutely aware of the space around us – the home environment or the public spaces we need to visit – and how they contribute to our physical and mental wellbeing.
While governments talk about ‘building back better’, at Mott MacDonald we have always thought about building better. As a management, development and engineering consultancy with many di erent arms, we are always looking for ways to create the optimum environment for the people who inhabit it. Health plays an integral role in this – we need to do all we can to contribute to the overall goal of healthy populations.
Our Global Health team brings together more than 100 experts from a wide range of fields, from epidemiologists and clinicians to healthcare planners and health economists. We are passionate about creating health equality for all and our vision is to create environments that lead to healthier populations across the globe. We deliver services around three key strands of work:
• Public health programmes including health system strengthening in low / middle income countries (majority of which are o icial development assistance programmes); • Healthcare system design and reconfiguration including healthcare infrastructure delivery; and • Embedding health considerations across the work that Mott MacDonald does in other sectors.
Public health programmes in low and middle income countries
We deliver public health programmes in low and middle income countries for international donors such as FCDO, GAVI, the Gates Foundation and others. We are currently managing the Country, Regional and Fellowship grants portfolio for Fleming Fund, a £265m UK aid programme managed by the Department of Health and Social Care supporting up to 24 countries across Africa and Asia to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We are also supporting the delivery of the UK aidfunded Better Health Programme, which is tackling noncommunicable diseases and quality of patient care in South Africa.
Healthcare systems fit for the future
Our experts provide support across the entire spectrum of healthcare from system design, planning and delivery of healthcare infrastructure to evaluation and monitoring. Moving forward, the focus needs to be on more sustainable healthcare systems with less emphasis on large acute hospitals and more focus on integrated care models. The application of digital technology will go a long way to achieving this as more and more people globally become increasingly technologically adept.
COVID-19 demonstrated that digital healthcare can be delivered successfully. We hope to help fast-track some of the technological advances that have been made, so we can help governments deliver healthcare more e ectively to their citizens. But we will of course still need hospitals, and our focus here is helping deliver hospitals fit for the future.
Focusing on prevention
Alongside the work described above, our future focus will also be on engaging with clients in other non-health related sectors to encourage them to think about their projects in an integrated way, with health outcomes being an important lens through which to view all projects. Every time our clients carry out a project we want to help them understand how the social determinants of health impact the health of populations – and how they have a role to play in creating better health outcomes through the delivery of their projects. Open spaces, better places to live and work, easy access, cycle and walking routes, all these can contribute to healthier living and reduce the disease burden.
Moving on from there, it’s about getting governments to think strategically, rather than assuming that more hospital buildings will resolve the issue. With less emphasis on healthcare and more emphasis on prevention, we can all help reduce the healthcare burden no matter where we are.
Therefore, arguably, it’s this third strand of our work that can have the most impact on health outcomes. By putting health professionals alongside engineering and infrastructure professionals at the start of long-term infrastructure plans, we can have a positive impact on health outcomes on non-health related projects. It’s about putting health considerations at the heart
of everything we do, reducing demand by focusing on prevention and helping people to lead healthier lifestyles. Architects, developers, engineers and master planners don’t always understand the health implications of the design decisions they make, so we are keen to keep health considerations at the forefront of the work we do.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mott MacDonald’s aviation team were working on the redevelopment of JFK Airport in New York and the client was looking to understand how they should react to the virus. We put our aviation experts together with our clinicians and epidemiologists to help the client understand the principles of infection prevention control to reduce the risk of transmission. This led to input into the restart programme for their airports as well development of their plans for pandemic resilience in their operations and new set of service excellence standards during a viral pandemic.
Every year the WHO estimates that 200 potential pandemics occur. Now that we know the devastation on human life and the economic impact a pandemic can cause, we have a shared interest in avoiding another one. We expect an increased demand from clients for pandemic resilience to be built into infrastructure projects – in a similar vein to how we are now seeing climate change addressed at all stages of a project.
Ultimately, the optimum solution is to design cities and the built environment with health in mind. With less pollution as a result of reduced tra ic, easier options for people to exercise and take care of themselves along with healthier buildings, we should all be able to play our part in reducing the global healthcare burden. We can achieve this, not only by taking greater care of our own health, but also the health of the people around us.
Richard Cantlay Global Health Portfolio Leader Mott MacDonald
