The Model

Rural health clinics across the developing world provide basic and essential health services to poor and remote communities. From pre-natal care to vaccinations for children, treating preventable disease and educating rural people about behaviors and strategies that promote wellness, community clinics provide health solutions within the context of people’s daily lives. Some clinic structures are brick-and-mortar facilities, others provide mobile services to isolated villages; the container model seeks to draw from the best practices of existing clinic interventions.

A shipping container, once retrofitted for use as a health clinic, is a durable, standardized, adaptable, secure structure with significant potential for replication and consistent care services. The interior of an industrial shipping container can be renovated to allow space for a small consultation room, a small laboratory, an office for staff, and storage and inventory space. Modified for ventilation, light, and utility connections, a container clinic provides a personalized, local-level venue for community members to seek treatment services or preventive health education.

The Container Clinic can be organized as a stand-alone structure or as a complement to improve services and capacity adjacent to an existing structure – health facility, community center, school, or church. The relatively small container clinic functions as a gathering place for community members; works with existing social organizations; and provides robust health education programming that addresses a multiplicity of community health concerns: prevention of disease transmission, sexual health, gender relations, women’s health, antenatal care and eldercare.

"In our work with shipping container design and construction, we have discovered that the best projects are those that let the container be a container. In other words, the more you utilize the container in its intended state, and avoid intervening on the structure with things like large openings, cantilevers, and double-wide spaces, the more cost and energy efficiency is achieved. C2C is a perfect example of this, because the selected containers are very appropriate for the concept and the program of the spaces.

"One of the other successful things about the C2C concept is that it marries important humanitarian and social goals with a momentum and high level of interest that exists right now for shipping container architecture. The two aspects leverage each other to achieve the mission of the organization."