HEALTHCARE CONSTRUCTION
‘Performing heart surgery on our own building’
With input from Jonathan Brindley, Sales and Marketing director at BladeRoom Group – a group of companies that includes ModuleCo, ModuleCo Pharma, and BladeRoom Data Centres, Professor Phil Begg, director of Strategy and Delivery at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, Birmingham, describes a recent project to construct a new theatre and ward block at the historic site, and the many benefits that harnessing modular construction brought to the project.
With over 40 years’ experience in the NHS, and as a clinical academic, and the director of Strategy and Delivery for one of the most established hospitals in Britain, I think you can safely say that I’ve committed myself to a life of learning. This last year, the curve may have been steeper than most; the only difference as I write this today is that there has seldom been a time when our health and well-being has been squarely at the top of everyone’s agenda – ironically, if you work in the NHS, there is never a time when it isn’t.
Now I’m remarkably fortunate – the location I’m about to describe – the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, Birmingham – is the place where I have the privilege of working, and it’s also a Grade 2 listed building steeped in history. Once home to the Cadbury family, this fabulous 11-acre site has successfully brought together a number of orthopaedic hospitals which have been in existence for a staggering 203 years. Today, the hospital itself offers elective surgery to local, national, and international patients, and ranks highly in the NHS for ‘positive patient experience’, but with the history of the building itself, naturally come the design and architectural challenges of facilities which were very much ‘created for their time’, have grown organically, and have sprung up as and when they were needed – from 1907 to 1990.
ModuleCo’s 110,000 ft2
modular assembly facility in Gloucestershire has served the UK healthcare sector for over a decade.
Necessity to create a new facility Fast-forward to the present day, and when we were faced with the necessity of creating a new facility at the ROH, that particular design legacy cocktail presented some very real and challenging obstacles. Pretty close to the top of the list is the way that the theatres are built, which is essentially in clusters of three, and all run by the same plant and machinery; thus, if any plant breaks down, you instantly lose all of them. Being a small, but very productive, hospital that focuses just on orthopaedics, the productivity and financial impact of losing three theatres is significant, to say the least, but equally, is not an isolated issue. The new facility was planned to be set at the very centre of the hospital, where it
would potentially cause the greatest level of disruption. Someone (it may have been me) coined the phrase that we were essentially ‘performing heart surgery on our own building’. Adding to its uniquely awkward position, you have the theatre complex on the right-hand side, the ward blocks straight ahead, and, to the left, the Residency and Outpatient Department, all surrounding the very area we needed to replace. All we had to do was get permission, remove over a thousand tonnes of earth, ferry huge lorries, and five hundred tonne cranes, in and out of a small kidney-shaped car park, and then build four new theatres and a twenty-bed ward at the heart of a working hospital – all while minimising disruption.
The new ward at the ROH, Birmingham includes 20 beds, combining 12 single-bed en-suite rooms (left) and two four-bed ward rooms (right). The extra capacity was critical in allowing the Trust to match its forecast increase in patient throughput.
60 Health Estate Journal May 2021
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