Improving resilience at one of Leeds’ biggest hospitals

In mid-2010 the Estates Maintenance Team at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust embarked on a far-reaching, £30 million, five-year project to significantly enhance the resilience and block capacity of the electrical distribution infrastructure at one of the Trust’s two biggest healthcare facilities in the city, St James’s University Hospital. Jon Craven, who in his current-day role is head of Estates – Compliance and Risk, at the Trust, and who led the scheme, explains the key drivers for undertaking ‘a complex and challenging electrical upgrade, the like of which is rarely seen in the NHS’.

The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the Yorkshire city’s largest employers, with over 16,000 staff. St James’s University Hospital, or ‘Jimmy’s’ as it is known, is one of the Trust’s two large acute hospitals in Leeds, the other being the Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) some three miles away. Located just outside the city centre on Beckett Street, St James’s University Hospital is a major centre for high-tech patient care, teaching, and research. The ‘flagship’ of the site is the £220 million Bexley Wing, home to the St James’s Institute of Oncology, which the Trust explains ‘contains 10 floors dedicated to some of the best treatment for cancer patients available anywhere in the world’. The top floor houses a ‘hotel’ for cancer patients and their families who live further afield. St James’s also has a busy emergency department (A&E), and is the Leeds centre for the care of acute medical patients and older people. To support this there has been considerable investment in new wards in the Gledhow and Chancellor’s Wings over the last eight years. The hospital is well known for its highly successful kidney, liver, and bone marrow transplantation services.

Logistically challenging