REPAIR AND REMEDIATION
With water ingress, the RAAC planks get saturated, getting heavier, and the reinforcement within them starts to corrode, while in many healthcare buildings, the planks have been cut to make space for a rooflight, and are supported on the adjacent planks.
save time and get the programme completed faster. We were looking at it taking 12 months per ward initially, and now we’re down to eight – which has brought the RAAC repair programme completion forward to 2028, ahead of the 2030 target.” “Here,” he added, showing other slides, “we have pictures of some of the more targeted repairs. We’re putting timber ladders under the worst case planks, and end-bearing enhancements to all the ends of planks where they meet beams, to eliminate that instantaneous failure risk. Where possible, we are also using existing structure to support the timbers.” He continued: “In the picture on the right you’ll steel PFCs (parallel flange channels) spanning across the corridors – original steelwork used to support services. We’re now repurposing this to support timbers that, in turn, support the RAAC.” This had been another contributor to speeding up the programme, because while the team had still had to remove a lot of services, it had to remove less than first expected.
Solutions being deployed ‘for a full remedial repair’ at the hospital include timber ladder frames parallel to the planks, and a hybrid solution – with steel beams and timbers spreading the load between the beams.
‘Bespoke’ RAAC management strategy Alongside the remedial solutions Curtins is providing, its team has also developed various management documents and strategies with the Airedale team. Oliver Organ explained: “We’ve produced a bespoke RAAC management strategy that describes how we will get from where we are now to a safer building, and which areas we will prioritise first, and how. We’ve also developed emergency procedures, for use in the event of a failure or other incident. In addition we’ve undertaken reviews around the estate on roof loading, and given advice to contractors who might be working on roofs, looking at what loads the buildings have been subjected to. Can we reasonably assume that those loads can continue to be supported?” Here, Oliver Organ handed over to the Trust’s Richard Burgin, for some additional detail on the safe system of work that Airedale and the Trust have developed jointly ‘to keep the hospital safe’. Beginning his part of the presentation, Richard Burgin
noted that that Airedale General Hospital is England’s only hospital (known) to have substantial RAAC, with the entirety of its ground floor formed from RAAC panels. He explained: “We’re in the UK’s eighth wettest location, with the largest flat roof in the NHS, and – as Oliver touched on – standing water and flat roofs are typical of RAAC construction from the period. There is also an inherent risk of moisture ingress into the panels, which dramatically affects their ability to carry load.” He continued: “We’re also the only hospital – we think – that has identified issues in our ordinary concrete frame and the corbels – the pre-cast elements of the structure that have significant structural challenges in too. We’ve just over 19,000 planks under load, with an additional 8,000-9,000 internal and external wall planks; that’s the scale of the problem we’re dealing with.” Richard Burgin went on to explain that since the since
the SCOSS (Standard Committee on Structural Safety) alert on RAAC came out in 2019, the Trust had undertaken its own survey, supported by Curtins, to assign a risk profile and defect rating to each plank, and that it continues to monitor this using its in-house team. He added: “Again, I think we’re the only Trust in the NHS that looks at that inspection and monitoring regime with internal resource. We then identify change to Oliver and his Curtins colleagues so that they can come and assist us with decision making and remediation selection.” Following the initial survey of all of the hospital’s floors
and roof planks, the Trust built a team ‘in house’ to address the problem using existing maintenance resource. Richard Burgin explained: “We believe that compared with other similarly-sized NHS estates, we’re saving around £500,000 using the internal resource model, rather than having a consulting engineer doing all the day-to-day inspection and monitoring. Working alongside Curtins, we’ve established a system of work that incorporates the survey methodologies, the Standard Operating Procedures, and the hierarchy of defect strategy documents that Oliver showed you in his previous slide.” The Trust team had also, he explained, developed
a ‘dynamic inspection tool’ that enables it to increase inspection frequency if the effects presented in the panel appear to have deteriorated, as team personnel move towards establishing whether or not they need to mitigate and remediate a particular plank. “Simultaneously,” he added, showing a slide from the ‘inspection tool’, “there you can see the different risk profiles listed on the right hand side, and the frequencies on the map. That buys us the time.” The Trust RAAC Estates stressed that one of the elements
his team must continuously consider is the business continuity of the estate, and the clinical operational function. “So,” he explained, “while ideally we’d close the entire estate, remediate the problem, and then re- open it, that can’t happen here because of the nature of the business we’re in. Instead, we must us all the tools available to manage the risk safely while maintaining business continuity.”
Former paper-based approach From 2019 until 2022, Richard Burgin explained, the system of inspection had been supported by a paper- based approach, with printing out of the existing asset drawings, which were then marked up, with a fully numbered panel drawing produced of every one of the 50 departments. The result was that all 19,000 panels were risk profiled and displayed on a set of CAD drawings. He took up the story: “We then printed out inspection pro formas and sent the team out onto the wards to complete the task of inspecting.” Currently,
50 Health Estate Journal February 2025
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