Facility engineered ‘through the eyes of a patient’

I have never worked on a project where £5 million was spent within the first 48 hours, and hope I never will again, but this spending decision sums up the urgency and shifting parameters within which we delivered Glasgow’s COVID-19 hospital, NHS Louisa Jordan. As we begin to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, it is imperative that we learn lessons from the design and construction of Glasgow’s field hospital. As an engineering profession, we need to assess what factors enabled the facility to be delivered so rapidly, and to look at whether some these can be embedded into future work. We also need to start to plan for how we might respond to future pandemics, and whether we can shift practices and designs to help ready the NHS.

AECOM started work on the conversion of the Scottish Events Campus (SEC) back in March. The plan was to initially provide NHS Scotland with 300 beds, including 100 high dependency unit beds, as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The facility had the potential for the number of beds to increase to around 1,000. At the time, COVID-19 infection rates were rapidly increasing, and the impact on Scotland’s National Health Service was unknown. There was a desperate need to provide more beds

Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said when she announced the new facility on 1 April: “Our NHS is on an emergency footing, and all health boards have been undertaking extensive work across Scotland to maximise the capacity available to manage expected rise in demand due to COVID-19.” (The new facility was being delivered alongside the roll-out of Nightingale Hospitals across England)