DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION
information, the cooperation of the local authorities, aided by the knowledgeable planning team of Barton Wilmore, and our decision to employ the impressive team from John Graham to build the main clinic – thereby saving on mobilisation time and costs – saw construction starting just over three months after the land deal had been struck.
Speedy progress on Reading project That speed, combined with favourable ground conditions considerably reducing the piling requirement in comparison to Northumbria, and not requiring a similar one-piece membrane, saw the Reading project catch up on the heels of the one in Northumbria, to be only three months or so behind it. With work in Newport still ongoing, this gave us three active proton centre projects running at once. This was great for our ability to learn from one, and quickly apply it to the others, with our project managers visiting each other’s sites to share knowledge, and a healthy competition running between the various teams from Pravida and IBA. Continuous improvement is a collaborative process – we’ve learnt to be just as interested in the learning ability of our supply chain as we are of our own people.
A ‘different customer’
There are a number of areas in the way that we work that make us a very different customer for our major equipment providers, IBA, Elekta and Philips. The normal customer for proton beam equipment is a hospital wanting to buy a single suite of equipment, their focus predominantly being on the speed of installation and commissioning, and on minimising the impact of that work on their other activities. While these aspects are clearly important to us, we are just as interested in the details of the process, the interfaces with the construction and other OEMs, and what can be learnt to improve its speed and efficiency for the next installation. When running projects with a gap as close as three months, we were at times pushing our partners to turn around their R&D and lessons processes faster than they were used to. Managing such a situation through creative tension, rather than friction, required well- developed personal relationships, a solid commitment to common goals, and good communication. The fact that we have continued with the same set of three key equipment providers, site after site, is a testament to how well that worked.
Construction on Liverpool centre underway
Construction on our upcoming centre in Liverpool began last year, and we will hand it over to our operating partners, Rutherford Cancer Care, in December this year. Our centres are geographically
40 Health Estate Journal October 2019
located to provide regional access to large conurbations of the UK population, although being a proud ‘Scouser’, our CEO might have had a little influence over our North West siting. This, our fourth centre, saw the next evolution in our development story, with the DFJ Design Team undertaking close collaboration with IBA and Elekta to develop our own in-house designs for the radiation vaults, as well as the rest of the clinic. This allowed us to create a full client design, and procure the construction, as a traditional contract with a single company. The tender competition was won by Interserve’s North West team, under the leadership of Phil Shaw. Phil Shaw, who became ICL’s NW Regional Director, was fresh from delivering the first NHS proton beam facility at Manchester (at The Christie), and brought along his proton-ready team. The team’s experience, as the only UK-based company to have delivered a proton beam therapy vault, played heavily in its favour during the selection. Another factor was the team’s use of in-house Interserve Engineering Services for MEP delivery, an enthusiastic team that took on board REL’s desire for offsite production and modularity – an approach that will bear fruit as we seek to efficiently replicate service components on future sites.
Real-time imaging and guidance In line with the Rutherford Health ethos of continuing excellence, Liverpool will see the introduction of our latest piece of cutting-edge technology, Elekta’s MR- Linac. This equipment provides the real-time imaging and guidance of conventional radiotherapy, providing the latest weapon in our fight against cancer, and a new set of challenges for the DFJ Design Team and our other partners to construct the suite for it.
Below ground, the Paddington Central site, part of Liverpool’s exciting new Knowledge Quarter, brought a unique set of challenges – a network of partly uncharted Napoleonic-era tunnels, asbestos contamination, the delayed relocation of BT’s main Liverpool data trunk-way, and proximity to an operating underground railway, to name a few. Each event produced challenges that our project managers, in concert with a great team of partners, overcame, and added to our pool of knowledge in the process. For such a young company, we are very proud of the three centres that we have delivered so far, particularly as all three have won awards, the latest being the 2019 Best Project of the Year Award for Constructing Excellence in the North East. In the future, Rutherford Health intends to continue developing our network of proton beam-equipped cancer centres across the UK, with the aim of providing
access to the highest-quality care within 90 minutes from home for the majority of our population. Concurrently, REL intends to apply what we have learnt ‘in house’ to the benefit of others, by offering design and development services to the outside world, continuing our own learning journey as we do so.
hej
John McIntosh
John McIntosh MSc, MA, FIHM, CMgr, FCMI, is the general manager of Rutherford Estates, and leads the delivery of infrastructure and estates management for the Rutherford Health Group. He has been with Rutherford since its inception in 2015, starting project managing the first site, then creating a team as the scale and complexity of the programme grew. Rutherford Estates says his ‘intimate knowledge of delivering a successful proton facility’, and his relationships with the design team and technology partners, have helped it become Europe’s ‘market-leader’ for Proton Beam Centre delivery in Europe. Prior to joining Rutherford, John McIntosh was an Army Officer, with more than three decades’ experience planning and delivering healthcare in challenging environments worldwide. He held senior board-level positions in Government service, and the private and charitable sector, and has been responsible for a number of major, multi-faceted, capability change programmes. His career includes roles as the MOD’s Principal Strategic Medical Planner, and as the Army’s director of Medical Capability. He sees effective human relationships as being the key to delivering projects, and has applied this maxim with success in operations in the Middle East, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as on building sites in the UK.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160
