| Designing a new general hospital is a complicated process and requires a lot of attention and knowledge from a design team. Generally, the design process consists of two phases: a planning phase and a design phase. The planning phase is extremely important and will decide the success of the general hospital. G D Kunders, an Indian professional hospital administrator and a healthcare facility planner, has stated "Failing to plan is planning to fail" (Kunders 2004, 61).;The main objective of this dissertation is to produce a guide that will be a reference source for the Vietnamese government to improve the current Vietnamese standard for hospital design, the TCVN 4470: 2012, General Hospital - Design Standard.;The proposed guide can be used as a tool to assist Vietnamese architects and other professionals in healthcare design areas in improving the quality of the hospital planning and design in Vietnam. This proposed guide can also be a teaching reference source for architecture educators to use in their instruction at universities in Vietnam and a learning resource to help architecture students understand requirements for spaces in a general hospital as well as how a general hospital functions so they can better plan and design it. It is set in an arrangement that can help educators and students without strong backgrounds in hospital design to easily understand how to plan a new general hospital.;The research methods used in this dissertation are (i) document reviews, (ii) qualitative research based on Post-occupancy Evaluation (POE), and (iii) comparative analyses. This dissertation consists of eight chapters, which include Chapter 1 - Introduction, Chapter 2 - Literature Review, Chapter 3 - Problem Statement, Chapter 4 - Methodology, Chapter 5 - Data Analysis, Chapter 6 - Findings, Chapter 7 - A Guide to Space Planning for a New General Hospital in Vietnam, and Chapter 8 - Conclusion. |
