Electrical Contracting News (ECN) September 2016 | Page 24

PROJECT FOCUS WRIGHTINGTON HOSPITAL The hospital redevelopment is creating a vastly improved environment for both patients and staff. to the new hospital extension. The company also oversaw the delivery of the design for the M&E works and provided technical assistance to ensure the project deliverables were met. Work began on site in June 2014, and the new facilities became fully operational recently. Extensive experience Although this was the first barn theatre complex NG Bailey had been involved in, it has extensive experience in healthcare, including working alongside IHP on a number of hospital developments in the North West. One of those IHP developments was the £40m, 154 bed in-patients unit at Blackpool, The Harbour. NG Bailey delivered the M&E, public health, information management and technology services to The Harbour, part of the Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust modernisation programme. Because of this previous experience, NG Bailey offered to take responsibility for the fit out works for the barn theatre at Wrightington, which had been earmarked for a turnkey company. In terms of overall costs and delivery timescales, this brought a number of benefits to the project, but clearly this had to be balanced with the added risk to NG Bailey of ensuring the innovative theatre complex met the expectations and challenging commissioning criteria in line with health technical memoranda (HTM) guidance. The key challenges throughout the £5.4m M&E project included ensuring the deliverables in terms of quality, the client expectations and the timetable for bringing the facility into operation were all met. The single biggest challenge faced at NG Bailey was ensuring the stringent air quality standards required in a theatre environment were complied with within an ultra clean barn theatre, where there needs to be scope for multiple operations to be carried out simultaneously. To help achieve this, engineers installed an ultra clean air ceiling canopy, which protects the room from airborne bacteria by ensuring a constant supply of fresh, filtered clean air into the theatre. Two of the theatre bays have body exhaust systems that remove bacteriacarrying particles emitted by the surgical team, diverting it away into an adjacent plant room. The heating and ventilation system is also designed to be flexible and controllable, allowing temperatures within different parts of the barn theatre to be adjusted to meet the individual needs of surgeons or patients. The surgeons can use the theatre control panel to access real time information on the ventilation and heating systems, and adjust accordingly. The NG Bailey IT Services team installed the data and telephone systems and cabling, and all electrical equipment was built by its off site manufacturing division. Having the electrical equipment built off site saved around four weeks on the project. The sinks were also pre-plumbed and insulated at NG Bailey’s offsite facility in West Yorkshire, while the panels for the integrated plumbing systems (IPS) were built off site by its partners at Inscape. Other electrical work included CCTV; bed head trunking; nurse call, fire alarm and damper systems; access control and LED surgical lighting. There is also a picture archiving and communications system (PACS) connected to a 42 inch screen, which allows surgeons to scan, store and view patient X-Rays within the clinical environment. ‘Working closely with our supply chain partners to ensure the correct product selection in line with user requests also helped to reduce the schedule. ‘Despite the significant challenges of the construction programme, completing the work around five weeks ahead of schedule meant the building could be delivered to the Trust in time to meet the high potential winter demand.’ NG Baley had an on site team of more than 40 people, supported by subcontractors, and the total of 30,000 engineering hours were undertaken without a single reported accident. The hospital redevelopment is creating a vastly improved environment for both patients and staff, with more single room accommodation, increased safety, improved clinical practice an