An extended whole-life application for the selection of hospital finishes

Motivated by the lack of effective tools that would facilitate the effective choice of hospital finishes; an innovative application for the optimal selection of hospital finishes is proposed. The logic of the application is designed around two generic whole-life costing (WLC) databases. The first is a resource database that houses data for several options for various finishes suitable for various spaces of hospital building. The second database is a project specific database which accommodates WLC data for the selected optimum set of finishes to be used throughout the hospital building life cycle. Their structures have been kept as general as possible. Besides, the use of the concept of the 'building space enables handling a typical building in a practical and convenient manner. Another unique feature is the addition of an easily edited table to store relevant non-financial criteria for each space type with their recommended weights. The paper concludes by introducing further research within the project to extend the proposed application to a useful decision support system.