HOSPITAL REDEVELOPMENT


Brighton hospital’s exciting £485 m redevelopment


One of the largest Treasury-funded NHS projects in recent years is now well under way at Brighton’s Royal Sussex County Hospital. The ‘3Ts’ project (Teaching, Trauma, and Tertiary Care) is being undertaken in three stages to minimise disruption, and will see all the buildings on the front half of the historic hospital site replaced by two new buildings. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to director of the ‘3Ts’ project at the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, Duane Passman, to find out more.


The new 11-storey Stage 1 building at the Royal Sussex County Hospital will incorporate new diagnostic and treatment facilities, an expanded critical care unit, increased facilities for the Emergency Floor, and inpatient beds and teaching and meeting facilities, plus a new main entrance and spacious reception area. The separate, but linked Stage 2 building will include a well-equipped and much expanded Cancer Centre and accessible roof gardens. The £485 m development’s third and final phase will see a new purpose-designed delivery and service area for this busy hospital created. As I walked through parts of the existing buildings to reach the ‘3Ts’ project offices where I was to meet with Duane Passman, I was immediately struck by how circuitous and multi-level the journey for patients, staff, and visitors, travelling from one part of the existing complex to another must be. Making all


the key clinical and treatment areas more accessible is indeed one of the key goals of this major redevelopment scheme. Before we discussed progress to date, Duane Passman put the scheme into context with a little of the hospital’s history. He explained: “The first building constructed, in the mid-1820s, was the Barry Building. The hospital was originally established as a sea-bathing infirmary. Ironically, just as it opened, sea-bathing went out of favour. The various benefactors therefore decided instead to make the new healthcare facility the Sussex County Hospital. It opened in 1828 with just 40 beds.”


Designed by famous architect He continued: “The original hospital was completed 20 years before Florence Nightingale started nursing, so none of the Nightingale principles are embodied in the Barry Building, parts of which are


Duane Passman, director of the ‘3Ts’ project at the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust.


no longer fit for purpose. I believe the Barry – at the hospital’s heart, and one of its most distinctive buildings – is now the NHS’s oldest building in England still providing acute care.”


Duane Passman explained that the Barry Building’s architect was Charles Barry, who gained fame in the 1840s designing London’s Palace of Westminster. He said: “The Barry Building, in particular, has been added to numerous times, and very little of the original remains. Initially the Sussex County Hospital and Sea Bathing Infirmary was effectively run by a Committee, who set up the hospital and funded it. The site, and the area around it, were pretty much open land. However, the adjacent St Mary’s Hall, a girls’ school, was already open.” In fact, following a wholesale re-location of staff from the Trust’s ‘old’ headquarters in 2012-2013, St Mary’s Hall, which was renovated in 2014, now serves as the organisation’s headquarters.


The Barry Building incorporates the current main entrance.


Long-standing plans for change Duane Passman went on to touch on some of the other milestones in the hospital’s development, explaining: “The hospital’s evolution stretches right back to 1828, when the Barry Building opened; it has been added ever since. In fact in 1928, ironically a century after it opened, the Hospital Board of Governors said they felt it needed replacement – it only


March 2017 Health Estate Journal 47


© BDP/Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust.


© Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust.


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