06 HEALTHCARE FOCUS - WSP Group

healthcare focus
A look inside WSP’s medical files reveals
a wide array of world-class healthcare facilities.
The next four pages feature some of our
recent success stories in Europe, the US
and Australia, while overleaf, one of our
design partners in New York shares his
thoughts on good hospital design.
case
hisTORIEs
In a company with so many large and innovative projects
around the world, there is bound to be a bit of intra-firm
rivalry about whose are the most challenging to pull off. But
Paul Stanley, director of property and development in WSP
UK’s healthcare team, thinks he has a few trump cards.
“My colleagues might say a tall building is complicated, but
there is no more complicated building than a hospital,” he says.
“There are critical care wards, operating theatres, and all the
issues around the spread of infection. The power supply has
to be resilient, as does the water. We don’t just have M&E to
deal with, but medical gas supplied to every bed. From a fireengineering
point of view, evacuating a hospital is not like an
office – you’ve got people in beds, people on machines. That’s
what makes a hospital a bit different. At the end of the day, if
the services that go into the building don’t work, people die.”
A laboratory is considered a difficult project in its own right –
in healthcare, it will be one small but crucial aspect. Before you
even reach the construction stage, there will be a mountain of
legal and financial paperwork, depending on which variant of
government finance or PFI is currently in vogue. A hospital’s
transport strategy must accommodate not only patients,
visitors and ambulances, but possibly helicopters landing on
the roof. And finally, Stanley adds, “nine out of 10 hospitals
are built on existing sites, where patients and staff are moving
backwards and forwards all day long”.
Stanley and his team are well practised in overcoming these
difficulties. Over the last 10 years, WSP UK has completed
many healthcare projects, from building a brand-new hospital
to extending or refurbishing a single ward. Its reputation for
delivering large hospital projects was sealed with the success
of the £300m Forth Valley Acute Hospital, completed in 2011.
WSP staff have just celebrated the opening of the £350m
North Staffordshire University Hospital, and are playing a key
role on the ongoing refurbishment of Great Ormond Street
Hospital in London, not due for completion until 2025. “We
can provide all of the engineering services that are required on
a hospital,” says Stanley. “Not just structural or M&E, but fire,
acoustics, vertical transport, urban planning, traffic, transport.
Our biggest selling point is that we’ve got all of the engineering
skills you need under one roof and an excellent track record.”
Now WSP is delivering one of the UK’s largest-ever healthcare
projects – New South Glasgow Hospitals, worth £840m.
Contained in a single building, it has a floor area of 172,000m 2 ,
equivalent to 24 football pitches. A jumbo jet would fit
comfortably inside the atrium. “This dwarfs anything that has
been built before,” says WSP’s project director Pete Dunbar,
based in the Glasgow office. “It will be the biggest building in
Scotland by a long way. The nearest is the Edinburgh Royal
Infirmary, and that’s only 120,000m².”
The campus includes a 14-floor adult hospital, with 1,109
beds mostly in single, en-suite rooms, and a 256-bed children’s
hospital. WSP is responsible for the main building – being
constructed alongside the existing Southern General Hospital
on the south bank of the Clyde – and the 2,400kW capacity
energy centre that will supply it. Together, they are worth
£650m. “It’s not just a new hospital in south Glasgow, it’s a reevaluation
and review of how healthcare will be provided across
the west coast of Scotland,” says Dunbar. “When it’s complete,
this will be the largest healthcare campus in Europe, providing
maternity, paediatric and acute services on a single site.”
The greatest challenge has been coordinating the vast amount
of information that goes into a building of this size, to ensure it
remains on programme. WSP is working with Brookfield, which
pre-qualified in early 2009 and was appointed preferred bidder
in January 2010. A year of design work followed, including a
consultation with clinical staff which brought significant changes,
before the first piles were installed in March 2011. “We started
on site very quickly, but the integrated design was lagging due
to the changes that arose during the clinical consultation,”
this will be the largest
HEALTHCARE campus in
EUROPE, providing maternity,
PAEDIATRIC and acute sERVICEs
ON a sINGLE sITE
says Dunbar. “That meant we had to work with Brookfield
to build in more flexibility while those elements of the design
developed.” The structural frame is now well under way, with
three of the main cores at full height, and will be complete by
August 2013.
The project has so far involved staff from seven different
WSP offices: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Stockton, Leeds,
Dublin, London and Delhi. “No business outside London has a
team big enough to deal with a project of this size in one office.
This has been a major team effort.”
paul.stanley@wspgroup.com
peter.dunbar@wspgroup.com
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