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EMERGENCY HOSPITALS


Facility engineered ‘through the eyes of a patient’


Thomas Rodger, MEng MIET, associate director of Building Engineering at AECOM, describes the critical first 48 hours of work converting a conference venue into Glasgow’s COVID-19 hospital, NHS Louisa Jordan, and how he believes the experience can bring about positive change in future projects.


I have never worked on a project where £5 million was spent within the first 48 hours, and hope I never will again, but this spending decision sums up the urgency and shifting parameters within which we delivered Glasgow’s COVID-19 hospital, NHS Louisa Jordan. As we begin to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, it is imperative that we learn lessons from the design and construction of Glasgow’s field hospital. As an engineering profession, we need to assess what factors enabled the facility to be delivered so rapidly, and to look at whether some these can be embedded into future work. We also need to start to plan for how we might respond to future pandemics, and whether we can shift practices and designs to help ready the NHS. AECOM started work on the conversion of the Scottish Events Campus (SEC) back in March. The plan was to initially provide NHS Scotland with 300 beds, including 100 high dependency unit beds, as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The facility had the potential for the number of beds to increase to around 1,000. At the time, COVID-19 infection rates were rapidly increasing, and the impact on Scotland’s National Health Service was unknown. There was a desperate need to provide more beds. Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said when she announced the new facility on 1 April: “Our NHS is on an emergency footing, and all health boards have been undertaking extensive work across Scotland to maximise the capacity available to manage expected rise in demand due to COVID-19.” (The new facility was being delivered alongside the roll-out of Nightingale Hospitals across England). AECOM’s work included project management, cost management, electrical engineering and IT design, civil and structural engineering, mechanical design


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The SEC Exhibition Centre in Glasgow has five main halls, a main concourse, a smaller auditorium, conference rooms, and office space.


review, a supervisor team of building surveyors, and health and safety advice. I was brought in to lead the electrical engineering.


The first critical 24 hours As the potential magnitude of the pandemic unfolded in March, the senior AECOM healthcare team in Scotland had met and taken the decision to offer our NHS colleagues whatever help they needed. We had thought this might be helping with administration via our project management team, or maybe refurbishing a ward – never in a million years did we expect to be building a new hospital. My first involvement with NHS Louisa Jordan was an email at 10 pm on the Friday evening from a colleague saying they were on site. By 10 am on the Saturday morning I was also on site – to start a project which would consume me for the next three weeks. When I arrived, the Army, AECOM colleagues, and architects, were already there. When I


The project moved from one which was being delivered by just the Army, to one which was to be delivered by a team pulled together from a number of firms on an existing NHS Scotland framework


walked in, the first thing they said was: ‘You’re the first M&E person that’s here – what do we need?’


On that first day, the project moved from one which was being delivered by just the Army, to one which was to be delivered by a team pulled together from a number of firms on an existing NHS Scotland framework, including AECOM.


The SEC Exhibition Centre The SEC Exhibition Centre has five main halls, a main concourse, a smaller auditorium, conference rooms, and office space. The site is supplied at High Voltage (11kV) from the Distribution Network Operator (DNO), with a number of transformers and LV substations serving the main halls. The initial design brief was based upon the NHS England document, COVID-19 ward for intubated patients Version 1.0, with additional ‘lessons learned’ from the NHS Nightingale project at the ExCeL Exhibition Centre in London. Clinicians were having discussions about their care plan, and the M&E had to be developed to facilitate that. I immediately saw that we were going to have to make some big decisions within 24 hours, and stand by them. One of our biggest challenges was resourcing, and how work was divided up. In the unique circumstances, where some


September 2020 Health Estate Journal 49


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