Aristide le dantec new hospital

ARCHITECTURAL APPROACH

The construction of a hospital is by definition an important and symbolic moment. The new CHU is the concrete sign of renewal, modernity and progress.

This facility, whose sub-design had been pushed to excess, no longer met the needs of caregivers, the expectations of patients, and the constraints of a technical, regulatory and economic environment whose requirements have steadily increased since years.

In order not to be confused by the punctual decisions made necessary by the emergency, to no longer simply undergo changes in its environment Hospital Aristide Le Dantec has decided to take its future in hand.

This led him to begin a broad reflection in the mid-nineties on the objectives of a hospital, its organization and its needs. The work carried out by the entire hospital-university community has resulted in the drafting of a master plan that outlines the CHU must implement to adapt its structures to cultural, social and technological changes. and economic aspects of our society.

Rethinking the hospital and adapting it to our cultural and social way of life to properly take care of our patients and carers in adapted health facilities.

This conviction remains deep inside me the only reality: it is useless to make reforms without a deep analytical approach of the place that we can attribute to a developing country (if we want to believe in a development), that the first concerned is the most impoverished population which is, in most cases, in extreme isolation.

A reflection in the hospital environment as it is conceived so far in Africa is urgent and necessary in order to regulate the migratory flows which transit in the hospital space:
The word migratory is used in comparison to a substance that moves inside a body:  » the hospital  ».

The architect is the organizer, the practitioner who must strike a balance between the logic of the strict character contained in the hospital idea and the outside world « the city » represented by the visitor.

Modeled on the Western model, the Senegalese hospital is poorly adapted to the African cultural mode of « caring for the sick ».
In African culture the hospital should not only be a place to welcome patients, but it is also a place of life where the patient is never alone in the face of his illness: « He is very often accompanied by one or two during his stay of hospitalization « .

The architect can not ignore this problem, which involves major organizational problems that hinder the functioning of the services. These problems first find their source in inadequate infrastructures. This results in a dispersion of efforts, especially with regard to accompanying persons.

« Our hospitals are submerged, Aristide Le Dantec hospital in Dakar was designed to accommodate 350 to 400 beds, It is currently over 1200 beds and each patient is accompanied by two to three people who take care of him. This is an economic problem, it is also a problem of social behavior « Pr Assane DIOP.

Patients accompanying the patients should be taken into account in an architectural approach, inserting them into the hospital environment without altering the functioning of the hospital body, and the tranquility of the patients.

Methodological research on hospital architecture in developing countries:
The observation of Aristide Le Dantec hospital in Dakar allowed me to develop a method of approaching architectural problems of effective and pragmatic development, knowing that a methodology is not a « lexicon » of ready-made recipes but a basic theoretical tool that must be handled with care when it is adapted to a specific field. We highlight the major groups of problems that are always linked to the intervention of the user, the taking into account of a culture, the legitimacy of its identity, the society in which it is integrated, as well as the problems politico-economic that will give us elements as to the nature and the possibility of an intervention.

My « methodology » does not pretend to be a theory applicable to any architectural approach in this field, it is only a personal analysis tool that will allow me to grasp the reality of a specific context with a field and a program that will be submitted to the judgment of the technicians and the population concerned.

Its aim is also to integrate part of the underprivileged population of the developing countries into the field of reflection on the hospital architecture.