HEALTHCARE FOCUS
A look inside WSP’s medical files reveals a wide array of world-class healthcare facilities. The next four pages feature some of our recent success stories in Europe, the US and Australia, while overleaf, one of our design partners in New York shares his thoughts on good hospital design.
HISTORIES CASE
In a company with so many large and innovative projects around the world, there is bound to be a bit of intra-firm rivalry about whose are the most challenging to pull off. But Paul Stanley, director of property and development in WSP UK’s healthcare team, thinks he has a few trump cards.
“My colleagues might say a tall building is complicated, but there is no more complicated building than a hospital,” he says. “There are critical care wards, operating theatres, and all the issues around the spread of infection. The power supply has to be resilient, as does the water. We don’t just have M&E to deal with, but medical gas supplied to every bed. From a fire- engineering point of view, evacuating a hospital is not like an office – you’ve got people in beds, people on machines. That’s what makes a hospital a bit different. At the end of the day, if the services that go into the building don’t work, people die.”
A laboratory is considered a difficult project in its own right – in healthcare, it will be one small but crucial aspect. Before you even reach the construction stage, there will be a mountain of legal and financial paperwork, depending on which variant of government finance or PFI is currently in vogue. A hospital’s transport strategy must accommodate not only patients, visitors and ambulances, but possibly helicopters landing on the roof. And finally, Stanley adds, “nine out of 10 hospitals are built on existing sites, where patients and staff are moving backwards and forwards all day long”.
Stanley and his team are well practised in overcoming these difficulties. Over the last 10 years, WSP UK has completed many healthcare projects, from building a brand-new hospital to extending or refurbishing a single ward. Its reputation for delivering large hospital projects was sealed with the success of the £300m Forth Valley Acute Hospital, completed in 2011. WSP staff have just celebrated the opening of the £350m North Staffordshire University Hospital, and are playing a key role on the ongoing refurbishment of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, not due for completion until 2025. “We
06 SOLUTIONS
can provide all of the engineering services that are required on a hospital,” says Stanley. “Not just structural or M&E, but fire, acoustics, vertical transport, urban planning, traffic, transport. Our biggest selling point is that we’ve got all of the engineering skills you need under one roof and an excellent track record.”
Now WSP is delivering one of the UK’s largest-ever healthcare projects – New South Glasgow Hospitals, worth £840m. Contained in a single building, it has a floor area of 172,000m2
,
equivalent to 24 football pitches. A jumbo jet would fit comfortably inside the atrium. “This dwarfs anything that has been built before,” says WSP’s project director Pete Dunbar, based in the Glasgow office. “It will be the biggest building in Scotland by a long way. The nearest is the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and that’s only 120,000m².”
The campus includes a 14-floor adult hospital, with 1,109 beds mostly in single, en-suite rooms, and a 256-bed children’s hospital. WSP is responsible for the main building – being constructed alongside the existing Southern General Hospital on the south bank of the Clyde – and the 2,400kW capacity energy centre that will supply it. Together, they are worth £650m. “It’s not just a new hospital in south Glasgow, it’s a re- evaluation and review of how healthcare will be provided across the west coast of Scotland,” says Dunbar. “When it’s complete, this will be the largest healthcare campus in Europe, providing maternity, paediatric and acute services on a single site.”
The greatest challenge has been coordinating the vast amount of information that goes into a building of this size, to ensure it remains on programme. WSP is working with Brookfield, which pre-qualified in early 2009 and was appointed preferred bidder in January 2010. A year of design work followed, including a consultation with clinical staff which brought significant changes, before the first piles were installed in March 2011. “We started on site very quickly, but the integrated design was lagging due to the changes that arose during the clinical consultation,”
THIS WILL BE THE LARGEST
HEALTHCARE CAMPUS IN EUROPE, PROVIDING MATERNITY, PAEDIATRIC AND ACUTE SERVICES ON A SINGLE SITE
says Dunbar. “That meant we had to work with Brookfield to build in more flexibility while those elements of the design developed.” The structural frame is now well under way, with three of the main cores at full height, and will be complete by August 2013.
The project has so far involved staff from seven different WSP offices: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Stockton, Leeds, Dublin, London and Delhi. “No business outside London has a team big enough to deal with a project of this size in one office. This has been a major team effort.”
paul.stanley@
wspgroup.com peter.dunbar@wspgroup.com
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