Comprehensive Resilience Assessment System:Towards Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Primary Healthcare Facilities in South-East Asia
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Abstract
As the climate crisis continues with more extreme weather events increasing the risks to people’s health, healthcare systems and facilities, it is becoming more urgent to address the climate resilience and environmental sustainability for primary healthcare facilities. This paper presents an international multidisciplinary summer school jointly organized by Thammasat University (Thailand), KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture (Belgium), in collaboration with World Health Organization (WHO) Téchne and WHO Country Office for Thailand, with the participation of partner universities from South-East Asia, to examine these issues and develop solutions. This research is about the development of a Comprehensive Resilience Assessment System (CRAS), an academic draft of an online checklist for primary healthcare centers, in suburban and rural settings in South-East Asia which are climate resilient and environmentally sustainable in the face of infectious disease outbreaks and/or natural hazards. Taking a systems thinking and a whole-of-society approach this paper outlines the specificities of primary healthcare centers and their role in an ever-warming climate, the summer school research methodology in terms of literature reviewed, preliminary data collected, and the novel pedagogical research-by-design process undertaken to produce the Comprehensive Resilience Assessment System online tool as a form of environmental assessment for primary healthcare centers.
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