Location: Pangasinan, Philippines.

Architect: John Ryan Santos & Partners, Inc.

The Sagip-Kanlungan compact hospital model has been designed to provide healthcare facilities to rural areas of the Philippines that are vulnerable to disasters and are often hours away from the nearest hospital. The model has a gross floor area of only 4,000 square meters but provides key service capabilities for a tertiary hospital. The compact design allows the hospital to be easily and economically built, which will allow rural residents to have access to a fully capable healthcare facility within their municipality. Each compact hospital is designed to be disaster-resilient, particularly against typhoons, which regularly hit the Philippines. It has a SHELTER MODE that shields all windows and vulnerable openings with metal shutters and is provided with redundant backup power systems. The various open spaces within the site have also been designed to accommodate tent housing for evacuated residents.

The Sagip-Kanlungan hospital is designed to be fundamentally simple and compact. Its main functional form and flow was derived from the idea of “unfolding a paper box.” At its center is a main function core and the various functional departments “fold out” from this center – as if unfolding a paper box. The result is a simple, easy to navigate floor plate with regular and modular grids. This makes the rooms easy to construct and simplifies the paths of all utility systems running through the building. Sagip-Kanlungan is intended to be the model component of what will eventually be a network of compact hospitals distributed throughout different rural municipalities that will be able to deliver healthcare services even if some of them are damaged during disaster situations. This decentralized hospital network is based on the resilience concept of the World Wide Web. The hospital building will be constructed at a cost of less than USD 3 million only, making it affordable for even small local government units in the Philippines. Using the private cooperative scheme, local residents of a community will have the option to invest in even small amounts in their local Sagip-Kanlungan. This will create a greater sense of participation in the local community by allowing residents to actually become invested in their local hospital.