Age influences on the job satisfaction of construction workers: Evidence from South Africa

This paper is the fifth in a series reporting on-going research within a Department of Health (DOH) funded research project to develop a novel decision support system for the optimal selection of finishes for healthcare facilities. The system has been developed by integrating a recently developed extended whole-life costing (WLC) application with the resource database reported in this paper. The database has been designed and implemented in MS Access to accommodate finishes' whole-life cost and time data and other data categories including quality, performance and other relevant non-financial data. The database structure has been designed on the basis of an in-depth analysis of the requirements of effective WLC decision-making during the design stage, the special needs of the healthcare environments, and the limitations of previous efforts to utilise databases to facilitate whole life costing. The database relational structure is explained and the data types and descriptions of fields of various tables are reported. In addition, a user friendly input form designed to facilitate editing data is included. Finally, directions for further future research are introduced.