Strong collaboration on Derry hospital development

Farrans Construction’s building of a new £36 million inpatient ward complex, the new North Wing, at Londonderry’s Altnagelvin Area Hospital, marks the continuation of a successful partnership between the contractor, its design and supply team, and the hospital’s operator, the Western Health and Social Care Trust. When the new 144-bedded ward building opens in 2020, it will mark another milestone in the continuing expansion of a healthcare facility that originally opened in 1960, but has since expanded significantly, to provide an ever more comprehensive range of medical services. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Located on Sparrow Hill just south-east of Londonderry in Northern Ireland, the original 1950s-built buildings – such as the central tower block – that form the heart of today’s Altnagelvin Area Hospital, were completed in early 1960, and the hospital officially opened on 5 July that year by the then Governor of Northern Ireland, Lord Lakehurst. As an interesting history of the site authored by Cahal Dallat, ‘Altnagelvin’s Thirty Glorious Years’, published in 1990, explains, the original buildings were built by local contractor, Colhoun and Roe; the Altnagelvin Area Hospital of the time had, at its heart, a 10-storey tower block, which remains to this today, comprising a ‘Treatment Wing’, housing medical facilities such as X-ray, laboratories, physiotherapy, and operating theatres, and a ‘Ward Wing’, accommodating nearly 400 beds in four and six-bedded wards. As Europe’s first new acute general to be built since the end of the Second World War, the hospital became what the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ publication dubs ‘a magnet of interest’. The book – which looks back well beyond the hospital’s first three decades to ‘two hundred years of medical care in Londonderry’ – explains that in the early 1970s, ‘much-needed services’ were added via the modification of existing wards. The first additional facility to open, (in 1972), was a Coronary Care Unit, followed in January 1973 by a five-bedded Intensive Care Unit, and, in June 1985, the first template of a ‘nucleus’ development opened, incorporating two 27-bedded orthopaedic wards, an Accident and Emergency Department, two operating theatres, specialist examination rooms, and ‘many other facilities’. The following years also saw the re-design of the hospital’s main entrance hall and reception area, and the opening in January 1988 of the second ‘nucleus template’, comprising Radiology rooms, a 24-bedded ophthalmic ward, and a theatre suite. 

Ongoing expansion