FAST-TRACK PROJECTS
Lancashire ‘surge hub’ created in just three weeks
Even experienced estates and facilities professionals would have found a three-week timescale to create, construct, and fully fit out a surge hub in a hospital car park a pretty daunting prospect. However, as HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from five senior team members involved in just such a project at a Lancashire acute Trust earlier this year, a resolve and determination to meet this extremely tight deadline, and excellent collaboration from all involved, saw the facility operational and ready to admit patients right on cue.
Last December, as a rise in cases of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 continued to put pressure on hospitals UK-wide, NHSE/I announced that eight NHS Nightingale surge hubs would be built at major hospitals throughout England – the Royal Preston Hospital, the Lister Hospital in Stevenage, St James’s Hospital in Leeds, St George’s Hospital in Tooting, Solihull Hospital, the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, Leicester Royal Infirmary, and Southmead Hospital in Bristol. NHS England said the new ‘surge hubs’ would be used ‘if the record number of COVID infections leads to a surge in admissions and outstrips existing capacity’. Like many large acute hospital Trusts, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust faced considerable additional pressures at its hospitals as case numbers increased. The Trust serves 370,000 people across the Chorley, South Ribble, and Preston areas, and provides several specialist services to around 1.8 million people from Lancashire and South Cumbria. Its two main acute hospitals are the Royal Preston Hospital in Preston, and the Chorley and South Ribble Hospital in Chorley. To find out more about the surge hub built at the Royal Preston Hospital – which,
remarkably, was delivered and ready to admit patients in just three weeks from the instruction to mobilise, and can accommodate up to 53 beds – I spoke recently via ‘Teams’ to deputy director of Estates & Facilities at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Cliff Howell, who led and coordinated the multidisciplinary team that masterminded it. Also joining the discussion were Shaun Ashworth, a senior project manager at the Trust, project manager, Lucy Roberts, Capital Commissioning manager, Karen Thompson, and external consultant, Louise Testa, who acted as the Trust’s Programme manager, and has fulfilled a similar role for the organisation on previous major capital schemes.
The Monday before Christmas Cliff Howell explained that he first heard about the eight surge hubs, and the need to mobilise to get them built, on the Monday before Christmas 2021. The email also noted the requirement to convert the Royal Preston Hospital’s staff canteen into a 16-bed ward. Cliff Howell said: “We did subsequently convert the staff canteen into a ward; staff were then able to use one of the other public restaurants in various
locations across the Royal Preston Hospital site. The next major occurrence,” he continued, “was on the Wednesday before Christmas, when I was contacted by our NHSE/I colleagues, who told us that the Royal Preston Hospital had been selected for one of the eight ‘Nightingale surge hubs’, which was to be built on Car Park B. I believe this followed a high-level review of potential sites for all eight proposed surge facilities by the central NHSE/I team. On the same day we were asked to supply comprehensive data on the car park, including drawings and dimensions.”
Instruction to ‘mobilise’ Two days later, at 4.00 pm on Christmas Eve, Cliff Howell received a call from the Estates lead at the local Provider Collaborative Board, who told him he and his team should ‘mobilise’. He explained: “The first thing we had to look at was creating the internal surge hub, so I spent Boxing Day designing a ward to go in a staff restaurant. As soon as we were all back, between Christmas and the New Year, we mobilised contractors, used our initiative, and converted the staff restaurant into a ward, which we accomplished in in just six days.” The
The surge hub at Royal Preston Hospital, delivered and ready to admit patients in just three weeks from the instruction to mobilise, can accommodate up to 53 beds.
June 2022 Health Estate Journal 45
Courtesy of Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
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