Crucial to this role has been the close working relationship developed with the Trust and their Technical Advisors prior to the project’s Financial Close leading in to the design process. Allowing CHt to fully understand and clarify the needs of our client in order to deliver the most technically efficient solution to meet the needs of key stakeholders.
The challenge
Project delivery
Demanding time scales for construction and procurement teams meant that the design process had to lead the way as an efficient means of developing solutions to enable programme milestones. The programme demanded the commencement of building services fit-out work just 20 weeks from Financial Close.
Clinical planning information release
Clinical planning is the key to the design process as this will always be a critical path deliverable for any design activity. This necessitates good working relationships with all client stakeholders (clinical staff) to work through the process. To align the clinical and service design elements, the main infrastructure and secondary elements (final room design) were separated to allow effort to be focussed on key deliverables for manufacturing and main plant procurement.
Energy delivery systems
Our vision was to integrate the facility to allow accurate assessment of the energy usage. As such, CHt developed a model to accurately meter, measure, assess and record energy usage for the four main energy sources of water, gas, oil and electricity. CHt’s strategy identifies how we will measure consumption which will allow comparison with our energy calculations.
Our services strategy is based around a system that is designed around various component parts, which are required to meet a range of contractual targets such as Gj/100m3, carbon, on site electrical generation and site renewables. Our system includes the following mix of plant and subsequent systems in order to achieve these targets.
- Boilers
- CHP (Gas & Bio fuel)
- ASHP
- GSHP
- Absorption chillers
- Air cooled chillers
The energy centre is a key facility to house the majority of this equipment and CHt targeted an early commencement in this area, given the complexity of the installations.
Building form
The unique building form, describing the “Hospital in the Park” has been a key theme throughout the bid and design process. This required an innovative approach to design and co-ordination with the building structure to achieve the client requirement of open, light and airy spaces to encourage a speedy recovery process for the patient. This has required the traditional view of horizontal and vertical distribution to be reassessed to minimise ceiling void space as an example.
Health and safety
Our Mission Zero initiative is a driver for any design solution that is considered, and is underpinned by our safety programmes across our business.
Our approach
By utilising a leading design partner - Hoare Lea Partnership - and embedding our key criteria and personnel, we have achieved an improved working methodology that ensured the tight construction time scale of six to eight months between financial close and design completion was realised.
This collaborative approach to solutions incorporating our design fundamentals and concepts allowed our design teams to be more creative and responsive to the decision making process, in a time-efficient manner.
The engineering behind our delivery
Close working relationships were established throughout the preferred bidder stage with our Engineering Excellence Group, to add value and support the design process and to provide peer reviews to key design solutions, design criteria and energy solutions.
We embraced the use of REVIT for the design and as a manufacturing and coordination tool. This enabled a smooth transition across all design stages into coordination and output to our manufacturing facility for construction of MEP modules. This streamlined the coordination between the design team and the CHt manufacturing facility in Oldbury.
The use of Digital Engineering/BIM allowed for greater integration of the building as a whole entity across the various design elements rather than individual building components, ensuring a high level of performance from the design team.