ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN
Ireland’s largest healthcare project progressing well
Bobby Conroy, Architect director at BDP’s Dublin studio, describes how the design of Ireland’s New Children’s Hospital has been developed around a ‘child and family-centred identity’, and explains how standardisation and digital technology have played a central role in the delivery of the project.
Located at the west end of the St. James’s Hospital campus in Dublin, the New Children’s Hospital (NCH), when completed, will be Ireland’s largest ever healthcare project, amalgamating the three existing children’s hospitals at Crumlin, Temple Street, and Tallaght. The brief set by the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB) was to create ‘one of the finest children’s hospitals in the world’.
In meeting this challenge, our design delivers state-of-the-art clinical functionality, the highest quality spaces for patients, families and staff, optimisation of adjacencies and flows between departments, and the creation of an efficient, safe, and therapeutic environment. Equally important is establishing an identity that captures the imagination of children and young people. To this end we focused on creating a simple design vision – a ‘Big Picture’ that is easy to understand and flexible enough to accommodate the contributions of multiple stakeholders, while retaining its original clarity.
The ‘Big Picture’ The building is organised vertically in four clear zones – the basement consisting of facilities management spaces, logistics, and horizontal distribution, together with plant and car parking, and the podium comprising outpatient, diagnostic, and treatment areas, and the public concourse. The interstitial floor accommodates plant rooms and non-clinical space and the wards block. The ground floor main public entrances
through the West, South, and North façades lead to the concourse – a
‘‘
An aerial photograph of the new hospital taken in March 2022.
significant civic room that orientates and functions as a ‘heart space’, and a focus for social interaction, art, and music. The Emergency Department (ED) is accessed at the east of the building via a new drop-off in close proximity to the existing St James’s Hospital Emergency Department. Emergency flows within the NCH are addressed by aligning the ED, Critical Care Unit, theatres, and helipad, directly above one another in the eastern ‘Hot Block’. Imaging is located beside ED on the ground floor, which also enables convenient key flows with the modular outpatient clusters on the west side of the concourse. Day care is located
We focused on creating a simple design vision – a ‘Big Picture’ that is easy to understand and flexible enough to accommodate the contributions of multiple stakeholders, while retaining its original clarity
above Outpatients at Level 2, horizontally adjacent to the main operating theatres.
The interstitial floor As well as engineering plant vertically aligned with the ‘hot’ clinical levels beneath, the interstitial floor houses administration space, workspace for clinicians, the pharmacy, and large daylit therapy spaces. The majority of the inpatient areas are located in the Oval Ward block above the podium garden at Level 4. Larger specialist wards with their dedicated outpatient areas are located at garden level, enhancing the experience of inpatients who occupy the hospital for longer stays. Six floors below and underneath the building, the new basement logistics area acts as a distribution hub for the NCH and the wider SJH campus. It is intended that automated guided vehicles (AGVs) will travel horizontally through FM tunnels to dedicated cores, each with individual ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ lifts rising to principal FM hubs at every floor.
August 2022 Health Estate Journal 47
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