KEF-TAHPI Showcases Revolutionary ‘Catalogue Hospitals’ Concept at Arab Health 2016

Monday 25 January 2016

Dubai - MENA Herald: Quick turnaround, cost-effective construction and quality control are key to closing the healthcare infrastructure gap in the region and eventually to ensuring access to healthcare for every individual, according to KEF-TAHPI Design Studio, a joint venture of KEF Holdings, a UAE-based holdings group with diversified interests including offsite construction and healthcare, and Australia-based TAHPI.

The comment comes as KEF-TAHPI showcases its ‘Catalogue Hospitals’ concept at the Arab Health Exhibition and Congress 2016, the Middle East’s largest healthcare exhibition and conference that brings together more than 4,000 exhibitors and attracts over 130,000 healthcare professionals attending from 163 countries. The event starts today 25 January and runs until 28 January at the Dubai International Convention & Exhibition Centre.

The KEF-TAHPI showcase, at stand OS2 in the Plaza area, features a realistic modular display of three standard hospital room types including an inpatient bedroom, bathroom and utility room that builds on the company’s effective modular design and construction proposition. Highlighting KEF’s use of advanced robotic technology, the stand also features one of the robots to be used at KEF’s upcoming Jebel Ali manufacturing facility.

Offering an ‘assemble rather than build’ solution, KEF-TAHPI seeks to bring about a disruptive paradigm change in healthcare infrastructure development. The company’s revolutionary industrialized approach to healthcare design and modular construction offers clients the convenience of choosing design options from a design catalogue with a view to reducing project costs and timeframe of implementation by almost 50%. The KEF-TAHPI Design Studio, located at the Dubai Healthcare City also offers a modularization services where the client’s own design is optimized and then fully delivered and installed as a true turnkey product.

The KEF-TAHPI ‘Catalogue Hospitals’ range from 16 bed clinics to 500 bed teaching hospitals and any size in between.

Aladin Niazmand, CEO, KEF-TAHPI, said: “Access to good hospitals and healthcare facilities is a basic human right that countries are seeking to provide to citizens. However, demand from increasing populations in the Middle East and India far outstrips supply of durable, affordable, quality infrastructure. KEF-TAHPI Design Studio’s cost and time-effective modular solutions cater to this supply gap for smart infrastructure offerings in the healthcare industry.”

Faizal E. Kottikollon, Chairman, KEF-TAHPI, said: “A World Health Organization (WHO) study has revealed that India has only one hospital bed for around 1,050 people as opposed to the US that has one bed for every 350 people. In Japan, this ratio is one for 85. India will need to add at least 650,000 beds by 2017 to improve healthcare offerings to its citizens. Taking into consideration the high capital expenditure and time involved in advancing this system, we believe the KEF-TAHPI Design Studio offers excellent prospects to public and private healthcare institutions in both India and the Middle East.”

The KEF-TAHPI Design Studio is currently overseeing the construction of its pilot project – a 500-bed tertiary hospital in Calicut. The PMHP Hospital, India’s first healthcare facility designed and built completely offsite, is one of the largest private ventures in India being built with a budget of approximately Rs 550 crores (US$90.94 billion). The project is scheduled for completion in Q3 of 2016, less than two years since construction began compared to the four to five year industry average that it takes to build a healthcare facility using conventional construction methods.

The prefabricated hospital modules designed at the Studio are manufactured at the KEF Infra One Industrial Park in Krishnagiri, India.

Kottikollon added: “We believe offsite construction and our unique ‘Catalogue Hospitals’ can transform the healthcare infrastructure segment in the UAE and the wider Middle East region. Towards this end, we aim to open a second manufacturing unit in Jebel Ali, Dubai, at an investment of US$100 million, by the fourth quarter of 2016.”

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