COVID-19 Emergency Planning

In March 2020, Marshall Craft joined a large inter-agency team to support the state of Maryland with their emergency facility planning efforts to assist hospitals with surge capacity planning and build alternative care sites across the state. The Baltimore Convention Center was identified as our first project site. For this facility, we established a floor plan that accommodated the 1:15 nurse-to-patient ratio within pod arrangements that allowed patients to be grouped by their level of acuity.

Our next step was to establish the different process flows to avoid cross-contamination:

• For staff: we provided spaces for staff to go through their personal protective equipment donning/doffing procedures before entering and leaving the space.

• For patients: we ensured access to functions that would support their physical and mental well-being while convalescing in the space for days at a time.

• For material management: we established the process of arrival, distribution, and disposal of medical supplies and equipment.

As planners and architects, we balanced the reality of designing a facility that was being constructed and programmatically established simultaneously. Our team had to react to changes from the doctors in real time and provide updated solutions on the spot. Diagrams and signage plans were created as communication tools to track these process flows and serve as the template for the development of other alternative care sites. In the end, we were able to build a 250-bed field hospital, complete with clean supplies, soiled washrooms, equipment storage, shower trailers, a pharmacy, a staff training area, a triage area, and food service capacity, all in just three weeks.