Adding Value to Community Health and Wellness through Construction Management: Meet Daniel Castillo

We sat down with Daniel Castillo, medical planner and associate project manager, to talk about community hospitals, wellness, and construction management. Skilled with a wide variety of software tools, he provides pivotal space analyses for facility master planning. Daniel is an expert in 3D modeling, site planning and space programming, and studied architecture at the University of Nuevo Leon.

Daniel, you’re an architect with expertise in construction and space planning. What is your career journey that led to working at Jensen Partners?

I started my career as an architect a little over eight years ago in Mexico and was looking for a new challenge. In 2018, I joined Jensen Partners and started applying my knowledge to healthcare planning. My journey started with learning a lot about healthcare institutions, the elements of hospitals and clinics, and a new set of perspectives that are unique to healthcare. I continued specializing in construction management, which I find to be very interesting and love doing. Through applying cutting edge site and space planning perspectives, I work on a variety of projects, including community hospitals, and I’m enjoying this work a lot.

Excellent. Could you tell us about working within a community hospital context?

In one context, we work with an organization that is also an insurance provider, serving a community in California. Our client has expanded their building capacity and wants to focus on providing a better quality of life for their employees and patients. With our architect and engineer colleagues, we create plans to achieve this goal successfully and through innovative approaches. The building’s entire design is focused on wellness, with the goal of serving the specific community it’s embedded in.

For instance, in one project, we found that about 80% of the users of our client’s space are women and developed a design that serves this community. When planning such a facility, we address areas from landscape design to fitness spaces within and outside the buildings, and we look at the whole system of care.

Fascinating! Sounds like you are very much focused on the users of the space and ways to improve their experiences. Could you share a bit more about one of your non-profit projects and the perspectives you brought to the table?

Working with a non-profit public health organization, it is especially important to make sure the community really benefits from this organization’s work. The main goal of this facility, for instance, is to provide wellness and care holistically. With such an exciting challenge, we look at how much time employees spend in the campus and what they need to sustain and improve their health. The decision to provide wellness to everyone who works at this community hospital came from our client leadership. I appreciate that perspective very much, since it carries a conscious choice to incorporate health to each element of the institution. Therefore, this facility is becoming a world-class facility.

I also recognize that the impact of our work is amplified by building trust and interpersonal dialogue. I have found that since a great number of construction employees speak Spanish, I get to understand and engage with elements of our work in a deeper way. Our team has people from a variety of backgrounds speaking many languages, and we each bring to the table the ability to communicate with our clients and their teams.

Wonderful. What has working at Jensen Partners taught you so far?

At the start of my career, I was inclined to work on project development and design. But while in Mexico, I noticed quickly that construction is a key part of implementing projects and began specializing in it. Representing owners and coordinating various elements of a project, such as regulations, funding, logistics, is such an important factor of success. I learned unique master planning perspectives through working with Frances and Sarah at Jensen Partners.

Loving what we do is very important, and our firm’s leadership is truly aligned with this. Frances says it’s very important to enjoy our work of contributing value to our clients, because it allows us to give our most to each project. This has been so true during my career here. I really love construction and therefore choose to work on each project with diligence by giving my most to achieve clients’ goals.

Thank you, Daniel, for your time! We look forward to your continued achievements.