SMART-H: SMART-Health-care facilities towards resilient, green, and sustainable medical systems.

SMART-H is the first step towards establishing SMART (e.g., resilient, sustainable, and green) Health-care facilities in Malawi and ensure continuity of operations of critical services before, during and after disasters and health crises to promote better community health and provide better services for patients and staff.

A novel roadmap for stakeholders will be implemented to assess the adequacy of existing healthcare facilities and establish the selection criteria to identify those facilities eligible for mitigation strategies.

It will provide an informed pathway on how government, business and society should intervene to prepare medical facilities to meet global standards and respond to disruptive events.

The novel concept of this research consists of creating an integrated analysis framework to i) assess multi-hazards by probabilistic analyses, ii) identify medical baselines (e.g., health-care building types with similar structural and architectural features) on a variety of parameters collected through field investigations, iii) develop dynamic structural and thermal models to assess the physical and energy performance, and estimate direct and indirect losses and health and wellbeing of people associated with disasters driven by climate change for prioritising vulnerable baselines, iv) recommend mitigation strategies and optimize them using life-cycle approaches to reduce CO2 and improve energy efficiency, and v) produce cost-benefit analyses to plan mitigation investments for reducing future impact from multi-hazard-risks and health crises.

This work will deliver a dataset, which will encourage stakeholders to take risk-informed and inclusive decisions at local, regional, and national level and promote medical facility renovations.

The results will demonstrate that multi-disciplinary research is crucial to prioritise the extent and nature of repair of medical facilities.

Depending on the policymakers' primary concerns different pathways should be considered to improve multi-hazard preparedness and response to health emergencies and disasters.

To maximise the impact of the proposed research, a workshop in Malawi will be delivered to illustrate the potential of the proposed strategies amongst policy makers and industries operating in health emergency planning and response. This will create additional drive across sectors for financial initiatives and alternatives for inclusive healthcare.

Dissemination of the research will be through publications in high profile journals and key conferences in this field.