Healthcare facilities are not immune to hacking; a reality made painfully clear when last year’s WannaCry ransomware crippled organizations around the world, including healthcare facilities. And according to a 2017 Identity Theft Resource Center report, just over 25% of all data breaches occurred in the healthcare industry. Read more

Robert Boraks is a Director at Parkin Architects Limited, Visiting Scholar at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University, and a frequent guest speaker at international conferences where he shares his understanding of trends that will help shape correctional facility design here in Canada and around the world. Read more

By:  Lynne Wilson Orr, Principal, Parkin Architects Limited

There can be very interesting stories behind why we design the building features that we do. Design is sometimes a challenging profession as it can take many years to see the results of your efforts, particularly in healthcare design. But every so often, you see a tangible and welcome outcome from something that was a challenge identified by a client’s story. Recently, we toured a new client through the Brampton site of ErinoakKids Centre for Treatment and Development and talked with staff about some of their stories. Read more

We are architects of social facilities; something we take seriously. Social facilities design requires the successful identification of naturally-occurring patterns, the development of new patterns, and the application of these to architecture. We believe that it is our responsibility to ensure our designs respond to the needs – personal, physical and emotional – of the users of the environments we design. Read more

Evidence-Based Design (EBD) is defined by the Center for Health Design as “the deliberate attempt to base building decisions on the best available research evidence with the goal of improving outcomes and of continuing to monitor the success or failure for subsequent decision-making.” Read more

Recently we had the opportunity to give a virtual tour of the Electrophysiology Room designed for St. Mary’s General Hospital (SMGH) as part of InsiteVR’s Immersive Project Showcase. The event was held at SMGH and invitees from across North America with virtual reality (VR) headsets were invited to participate. Read more