Changing building user attitude and organisational policy towards sustainable resource use in healthcare

•Care spaces involve complex socio-technical systems.•Resource allocation is critical to optimise resource sustainability.•Organisational semiotics helps identify critical stakeholders and KPI that exist.•Collateral structuring allows policy makers identify interaction and dependence.•A semantic building information model would facilitate live information feedback.

Health care provision is significantly impacted by the ability of the health providers to engineer a viable healthcare space to support care stakeholders needs. In this paper we discuss and propose use of organisational semiotics as a set of methods to link stakeholders to systems, which allows us to capture clinician activity, information transfer, and building use; which in turn allows us to define the value of specific systems in the care environment to specific stakeholders and the dependence between systems in a care space. We suggest use of a semantically enhanced building information model (BIM) to support the linking of clinician activity to the physical resource objects and space; and facilitate the capture of quantifiable data, over time, concerning resource use by key stakeholders. Finally we argue for the inclusion of appropriate stakeholder feedback and persuasive mechanism, to incentivise building user behaviour to support organisational level sustainability policy.