Hospital benefits from harmonious setting

Handed over to the Trust last June, with the first patients admitted in August, the new £23.5 million Brentwood Community Hospital was constructed by Mansell for property investment and development company Kajima Partnerships, and houses medical services run by the NHS South West Essex Primary Care Trust (PCT). Designed by architects Sheppard Robson to bring together under one roof within a modern, “one-stop” community healthcare facility services previously spread across the Brentwood district, the three-wing, 2.5-storey hospital incorporates services including inpatient rehabilitation (with 50 inpatient beds), antenatal, dental, chiropody, radiology, endoscopy and “minor ops”, integrated therapy, children’s services, community midwifery, and community nursing. Plans for the new hospital’s construction were first seriously put on the table on the 1998 publication of the Brentwood Review, a joint consultation project conducted by the former South West Essex Health Authority and Brentwood Borough Council which gauged the views of local organisations and individuals in formulating a roadmap for future healthcare provision at local primary, community, and acute outreach and social care levels, within the district. The “vision” for the new hospital was always very much in line with the national NHS policy of “providing the right care in the right place, close to where people live”.

Shifting services to local community

The Trust says the key goal of building the new facility was to “shift services into the local community, with an emphasis on integrating health and social care to provide an efficient, streamlined, and improved service”. Other aims included meeting chronically ill people’s needs more effectively; reducing the need for local people to travel outside the area for outpatient and diagnostic services; improving home and community-based care for elderly people to minimise the need for hospital admission; continuing to develop and improve health services for local residents in the community, and minimising acute admissions, thereby enabling acute sites in the locality to focus on delivering primary and secondary care services. Fiona Drane, associate director, capital planning, in the estates and facilities department at the NHS South West Essex PCT, who headed up the the project for the new hospital’s construction from the Trust side, explained that the outline business case for a new PFI-funded hospital went forward to the OJEU process in July 2004, with 12 contractors subsequently expressing a final interest. “The level of interest was really not that surprising given that this was a really nice scheme, in an excellent location, with a great deal going for it,” she explains. “All this was also occurring at the height of PFI’s popularity.” Just three consortia, which had scored highest in the Trust’s pre-qualification questionnaire, were shortlisted, with Kajima Partnerships subsequently emerging as preferred bidder. David Bridge, operations manager at the company’s London office, elaborates: “UK healthcare is one of Kajima’s core areas of expertise, and we saw the new Brentwood Community Hospital as an exciting project that would offer us the opportunity to demonstrate our skills within the sector.” (One of the company’s other especially notable healthcare schemes involved the construction of the maritime-themed Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital in Brighton). Following unanimous approval by the Essex Strategic Health Authority in March 2006 for the full business case (submitted by the then Billericay, Brentwood and Wickford Primary Care Trust, which later merged with the Thurrock and Grays PCT to form the NHS South West Essex PCT), financial close on the new community hospital was achieved three months later. The site was then handed over to Kajima and its construction partner Mansell in early July 2006, with the first stage of the project seeing 12 weeks of demolition, including, in the words of Andy Instance, Mansell’s operations manager, London Major Works (who supervised the project), “dealing with a very substantial number of trees”.