SPONSORED BY HEALTH SECTOR NEWS


How things have changed in 150 years Historical viewpoint


As the company marks its 150th anniversary, James Wimpenny, CEO of BAM Construct UK, looks back at changing trends and some of the company’s most notable hospital projects.


It is 144 years since we created St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner – for the princely sum of £6,000. You don’t get much hospital for that these days, although, in today’s money, it represents over a million pounds. We’ve created around 300 hospital schemes in our 150 years of doing business in Britain. Some of them are now lost in time, like the Cheyne Hospital for Children, built in 1888, which moved to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in 1993, or London’s Hospital for Tropical Disease, destroyed in the Blitz. Our depot was also bombed in 1940.


James Wimpenny.


Consumption in Mount Vernon (1881) an early example. In the new millennium, MRI is one of the modern specialisms, and we’ve found ourselves creating facilities such as the Imaging Centre of Excellence scheme at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and the Children’s Hybrid Theatre & Intraoperative MRI at Leeds General Infirmary. But there is a saying, ‘plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose’.


Some things haven’t changed.


Commissioned by war departments In 1914 and 1922, we created hospitals commissioned by war departments. In the 1940s, we were erecting emergency hospitals, for example in Hereford, and then, post-war, converting them back into everyday use. For example, Marston Green in Birmingham we turned into a maternity hospital in 1948. We reinstated hospitals following war damage, such as at Great Ormond Street’s London Homeopathic Hospital in Bethnal Green in 1950. I hope we never see such times again.


Breakthroughs in research created a need for specialist and research hospitals, with The Hospital for


For instance, some hospitals were pioneers in long-term partnerships with contractors that allowed them to develop estates incrementally. Early adopters were Guy’s Hospital, for whom we had half a dozen contracts in the 1940s 1950s, and 1990s. St Mary’s in Paddington was the market- leader in partnering; we worked with it 15 times between 1884 and 1958. Bedford General Infirmary and The Mothers Hospital also formed strong bonds with us.


Health frameworks


Health frameworks have now captured what some had figured out for themselves – that you can harness far more from a contractor through collaborative working than by constantly revisiting the market. Even now, this is an underexploited model that NHS Trusts could – and should – do more to capitalise on.


Hospitals have many working parts; often complex ones. When I look into the archive I see small schemes such as boiler houses for North Manchester Hospital, and lavatory blocks. These can be critical to maintaining buildings that are highly serviced, constantly in use, and for whom heating, lighting, and energy efficiency are as critical as cleanliness.


1973 was a big year for large hospital schemes, when we created Derriford Hospital in Plymouth (350 beds), then the largest hospital in the West of England, and St George’s Hospital, Tooting, at the


The Hospital for Consumption in Mount Vernon, built in 1881.


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Health frameworks have now captured what some had figured out for themselves


St George’s Hospital in Tooting.


time Europe’s largest teaching hospital. There was also the 12-storey, 632-bed Charing Cross Hospital, and the 500-bed Bangor Hospital, which led to a major scheme next door in Wrexham. (It is with excitement that we are returning to Southampton General, which we also built, in 1973.)


Like Charing Cross, hospitals can be located in city centres and logistically difficult, or set in holistic healing environments like Wharfedale, Yorkshire, and the lovely community hospital at Cumnock in Scotland, where we manage facilities. That’s another good way to capitalise on your building’s data – through a continuing partnership after the building is complete. Data is ‘the new oil’, it has been said. What the capital framework for healthcare has recognised is that hospitals cannot readily be replaced wholesale. They become tied to their locations, and comprise a suite of buildings, some nigh obsolete, others state-of-the-art. Seldom can they secure sufficient money to conduct estate development in one go. P22 is allowing them to upgrade progressively and intelligently, and is transforming healthcare over a period of years – as at Oxford John Radcliffe and Sheffield NHS Teaching Hospitals. I shall not forget working at Fazakerley Hospital in 1994, when I was a project manager; 25 years later, the A&E department I created was in need of a major overhaul, and the client (now Aintree Hospital) came back to us to do the work.


I can tell you personally that there is nothing as motivating as building a new hospital, or working on its facilities. These are why we build. Now I have over 300 reasons to look back on the archive with pride in what my contemporaries and forebears have done, knowing that the development of our healthcare buildings has never been in better hands.


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