The recent Covid-19 pandemic once again highlighted the hospital’s vital role in the community. It also normalized working from home. Our industry now has engineers and designers working remotely from other states. Though this is nothing new, it is now the norm. Does this have any adverse effect on the plumbing design community? From my point of view, the answer is no. We must stay true to ourselves, practice self-discipline and not cut corners when reading and applying the codes and standards to our design. We must move away from the mentality of, "This is how we do things here, and it has been working for so many years, so I will design it that way."
With people in our industry moving around, it is not uncommon to run into plumbing contractors and installers that are not well-versed with the code for the state in which they just moved to. With the pressure of building a more efficient hospital, but at a lower cost, coupled with contractors and designers who are not aware of the local building code, we are now seeing more VE and cost-cutting items that we typically do not usually see in hospitals.