Northumberland-headquartered Merit, an industrialised construction and digital manufacturing specialist, has been appointed by the Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to design and deliver a new Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) Unit on site at Bedford Hospital.
The £3.6 m facility, which will utilise advanced offsite construction methods for its delivery, will be completed this July. Works to manufacture the offsite components will start in Merit’s Cramlington-based smart factory later this month. Merit says that ‘by pioneering a new industrialised construction approach’, its product-based solutions are ‘perfectly suited to meet the growing demand for faster and more cost-effective healthcare facility delivery, while also prioritising sustainability’.
The new SDEC Unit will incorporate consultation rooms, clinical management rooms, examination rooms, assessment areas, and other supporting services. To deliver the facility, Merit will utilise its new UltraPOD SFS variant – an expandable full-building solution that can be customised to create various types of buildings for different purposes. This variant harnesses Merit's latest roll former, panel line production system, which the company says ‘enhances project affordability and accessibility, while significantly reducing the construction timeline’. Merit said: “The V6 platform comes as standard, rated BREEAM Excellent as a minimum, EPC-A, and with energy consumption reportedly 69 per cent lower than current CIBSE hospital benchmarks.”
