Building Performance Evaluations for New and Existing Long-Term Care Homes

建筑不仅对环境有重大影响，而且对居住在其中的人的健康和健康也有重大影响。COVID-19大流行对长期护理的老年居民造成了不成比例的影响，揭示了这些设施存在的严重潜在问题，迫切需要重新思考长期护理之家的设计、建设和运营。尽管具有环保意识的建筑实践不断增长，但在考虑到影响居住者健康、生产力和福祉的能源使用、温室气体排放、水消耗和室内环境质量的预测值和实际值时，预期和实际建筑性能之间仍然存在差距。关于长期护理部门建筑物的性能也缺乏数据。为了更好地了解这些性能差距，并确定在建筑设计、施工和改造/翻新方面的潜在改进，可以利用评估建筑性能的工具。长期护理院有专门的工具包，但主要集中在环境和室内布局、辅助措施、方向和寻路等基本属性上，而不是影响人类健康的建筑设计、施工和操作因素。该项目由红河学院建筑节能技术访问中心牵头，将开发和试验更好的工具，以促进长期护理院绩效评估的知识和应用，以改善其居民和员工的健康和福祉。这些工具的应用将使政府、私人和公共长期护理组织以及建筑行业能够做出更好的、基于证据的决策，以改善建筑运营和维护实践，并针对新建长期护理之家的建筑特征和现有长期护理之家的改造/翻新战略进行有针对性的投资。

Buildings have a major effect not only on the environment, but also on the health and wellness of the people who occupy them. The COVID-19 pandemic's disproportionate impact on elderly residents in long-term care has revealed serious underlying problems in these facilities and an urgent need to rethink the design, construction and operation of long-term care homes.Although environmentally conscious building practices continue to grow, there is still a gap between anticipated and actual building performance when considering the predicted and actual values for energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and indoor environmental quality that impacts occupant health, productivity and well-being. There is also a lack of data regarding the performance of buildings in the long-term care sector.To better understand these performance gaps, and to identify potential improvements in building design, construction and retrofit/renovation, tools to evaluate building performance may be utilized. Specific toolkits exist for long-term care homes but concentrate primarily on basic attributes such as ambience and interior layout, assistive measures, orientation and wayfinding rather than building design, construction and operation factors that impact human health.This project led by Red River College's Building Efficiency Technology Access Centre will develop and then pilot better tools to advance the knowledge and application of performance evaluations in long-term care homes to enhance the health and wellness of their residents and staff. Application of these tools will enable governments, private and public long-term care organizations as well as the building industry make better, evidence-based decisions about how to improve building operation and maintenance practices and target investments in construction features for new long-term care homes and retrofit/renovation strategies of existing ones.