HOSPITAL CONSTRUCTION
population of around 600,000 in a catchment area of Gwent and South Powys. The Grange University Hospital will deal with major emergencies while treating and caring for patients requiring complex, specialist, or critical care. Its 24-hour emergency department and assessment unit will sit alongside a range of diagnostic services, 17 specialist theatres, and a consultant-led obstetric unit. It will have a dedicated paediatric assessment unit to manage all paediatric emergencies, and will be a base for neonatal intensive care.
Also at the site will be pathology, pharmacy, and radiology services, including MRI and CT scanning facilities. Hospital services will transfer from the nearby Royal Gwent and Nevill Hall Hospitals, and there will be a helipad built on site so that emergency cases can be transferred quickly. The completion date for The Grange University Hospital is 2020 – with a three-year programme for construction, fit-out, testing, and completion. The hospital will receive its first patients in early 2021.
Greatly anticipated
Once the ‘green light’ had been granted in 2016, there was a desire to get on with the scheme to deliver what was a greatly anticipated new healthcare system in Gwent. Both the Welsh Government and ABUHB had been in over 15 years of negotiations, and the challenge was to achieve completion within the shortest time, but without compromising the facility’s core values, set out in the Designed for Life manifesto. The ABUHB required progressive solutions to meet its progressive ambitions, and it was our Design for Manufacture and Assembly 70:60:30 (‘DfMA 70:60:30’) capability that brought us onto the framework to deliver the hospital. The figures in that acronym relate to our ambitions to conduct 70% of a project’s construction offsite, leading to a 60% improvement in productivity, and a 30% improvement in delivery schedule.
To deliver on those ambitions, a defined set of 4,000 construction products are digitally engineered to a precise specification. The products, such as concrete floor-slab elements, walls, 612 structural columns, and 7,000 m2
of
architectural façade sandwich panels, are designed, manufactured, tested, and commissioned, at our Explore Industrial Park (EIP) in Nottinghamshire, 200 miles from Gwent. EIP is Europe’s most automated concrete production facility, and our capability to manufacture for offsite construction underpins our aspiration for innovative delivery. Complementing our concrete facilities, we also have a mechanical and electrical manufacturing capability at Oldbury in the West Midlands, where modular
50 Health Estate Journal January 2019
It has been over 15 years in the making, but last spring, Gwent’s new £350 million Grange University Hospital came out of the ground.
plantrooms have been designed, manufactured, tested, and commissioned, in controlled factory conditions before being transported for on-site assembly.
An end-to-end process The benefit of a DfMA approach for projects of this scale, such as The Grange University Hospital, is the end-to-end digital design, manufacture, and carefully planned logistics for delivery. It is far more precise – transforming traditional construction methods into modern processes of assembly using lean automation and quality assurance systems. By measuring our previous projects, and during the initial digital design for this scheme, we have been able to demonstrate that less resources in terms of labour and materials would be used throughout the process. Gleeds’ project manager, Victoria Head, said: “Not only does a pre-assembled solution result in overall efficiencies with programme time, but it also offers cost certainty and predictability at the start of the programme and throughout, which was of upmost importance to us and the Welsh Government.”
We worked extensively with the Welsh Government and ABUHB taking them through the DfMA approach, instilling confidence that we would successfully deliver what has been described as a ‘Super-Hospital’. It also wasn’t just the client and the funding partners who we
The project team
The Laing O’Rourke project team on the new Grange University Hospital comprises: n Architects, landscape architects, Planning and Acoustics – BDP (Bristol Studio). n Civil and structural engineering plus lifts – WSP (Cardiff). n Mechanical & electrical engineering, Public Health, fire engineering, and BREEAM Assessor – AECOM (Cardiff). n Building Control – Bureau Veritas (Cardiff).
engaged with; the Laing O’Rourke team needed to explain to the market and its supply chain how this level of innovation – never achieved on this scale – would be achieved.
Site visits
Through site visits to EIP, we have been able to demonstrate to AHUHB how we could apply digital engineering techniques to generate the bulk of construction works off site, reduce the number of people on site, and deliver a reduced programme of works with improved safety measures. We took teams to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, which was completed in December 2014, and where we had developed a three- dimensional digital engineering tool and created one of the UK’s first projects to transfer digitally engineered component models directly for offsite manufacture. The team had recently completed the Llandough University Hospital for the Cardiff & Vale University Health Board, and via this successful project we could demonstrate how DfMA could add far greater cost and timing certainty than if the hospital had been completed using traditional construction techniques. ABUHB’s Liz King said: “Laing O’Rourke presented something new, but the NHS is traditionally very conservative, and the majority of our hospitals are built using tried, tested, and trusted, methods. With public money at stake, we wanted to
©Paul Davies
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