The Portakabin Group has secured a £10 million contract for the off-site construction of two new buildings which will provide clinical services during the 3Ts Redevelopment of the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.
Procured under the ProCure21 framework, the contract, which uses a Yorkon off-site solution, includes construction of the Portakabin Group’s first six-storey building in the health sector.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust has appointed international construction and engineering group, Laing O’Rourke as the supply chain lead for the 3Ts Redevelopment, which will provide new facilities for general medical, specialist tertiary, trauma and teaching services locally and across the region. The two modular buildings are due for completion in autumn 2015 and will provide purpose-designed accommodation for clinical services, which in turn will create space for the site redevelopment whilst ensuring continuity of care.
The six-storey building will house services such as nuclear medicine, physiotherapy and rheumatology outpatients, offices, a radio pharmacy, and a rehabilitation gymnasium. It will remain on site until stage one of the 3Ts Redevelopment is completed in 2019. The facility is designed to accommodate cardiac, gamma and specialist CT machines on the ground floor. The second building will provide three levels of ward space and is located in a semi-enclosed courtyard on a steel transfer platform above the existing A&E department. It will remain on site until a new cancer centre is completed towards the end of the redevelopment.
The off-site approach will allow the constrained courtyard site to be utilised and the Yorkon modules will be craned into position over a plant room building. This operation will be carried out over a number of weekends to minimise any disruption to patient care.
By using a Yorkon modular solution for both schemes, the facilities will be built to permanent standards with a 60-year design life and in compliance with NHS requirements, but have the flexibility to be removed, recycled and relocated to another site or can remain in place. Off-site construction is also reducing the programme time to allow the early commencement of the main redevelopment.
The steel-framed modules will arrive on site around 35 per cent fitted out, and the first building will be handed over less than six months after the units arrive on site.
Commenting on the project, Simon Ambler, Director of the Portakabin Group, said, “Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is an existing Portakabin Group client, who we are delighted to be working with again. This is a highly complex contract which will involve constructing two Yorkon buildings with detailed technical specifications, on an extremely constrained and busy hospital site, in a short time frame and simultaneously.”
“The clinical building is also our first six-storey scheme in the healthcare sector which demonstrates the advanced performance capabilities of our Yorkon off-site solutions.”
Duane Passman, Director of 3Ts at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, said, “These two buildings are crucial to unlocking the space for the main hospital redevelopment to go ahead and to providing the highest standards of care during that programme. Some of our existing facilities are nearly 200 years old – among the oldest in the NHS, and can no longer meet the needs of our patients or clinical teams. Subject to the approval of the programme’s full business case, work on the redevelopment’s main scheme will begin in autumn 2015. When complete, it will significantly improve patients’ care and experience.”
The Yorkon clinical buildings will require 90-minute fire protection to the structural elements and the very close proximity of both schemes to the adjacent hospital buildings requires additional detailing to meet fire separation requirements.
The Portakabin Group has an extensive track record in the healthcare sector, having completed a wide variety of bespoke building projects using Yorkon off-site solutions, including ward extensions, self-contained theatre blocks, emergency care units, haemodialysis centres, offices, community clinics, and complete hospitals, with all the speed and quality advantages of off-site construction.
The Group has recently delivered the UK’s largest and most complex modular building project to be built in the health sector – the new Women and Children’s Centre at North Middlesex University Hospital.