In one of the architectural practice’s largest ever contracts of its kind, Nightingale Associates is playing a major part in a £335 million local health reconfiguration project (the Greater Peterborough Health Investment Plan) which should see primary and acute care provision transformed in Peterborough and its surrounds.
Jonathan Baillie reports on the completion of two impressive new Nightingale-designed buildings constructed as key scheme elements.
Nightingale Associates has recently seen the successful culmination of over five years of in-depth planning and design work with the completion of both the second phase of the Cavell Centre – a new acute mental health unit operated by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) located on Peterborough’s Edith Cavell Hospital site, and the handover, by the same contractor, Brookfield Construction, of the City Care Centre, a two-storey primary care centre built one and a half miles away on the periphery of the existing Peterborough District Hospital site near the city centre. In developing the Cavell Centre, (named after Edith Cavell, the Norfolk-born nurse and humanitarian executed by the Germans during World War I for helping Allied prisoners escape from Belgium), the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust wished to provide high quality inpatient care within one purposebuilt facility for adults, older people and those with specialist learning disability with a range of mental health problems. The region’s existing mental health accommodation was previously widely spread geographically, and the CPFT wished to create a “stateof- the-art”, purpose-built facility to meet the needs of local people. Incorporated within the attractively designed new building, which has a non-institutional, light and airy feel, are 42 “older person” inpatient and 44 adult inpatient bedrooms, a 10-bed learning disability unit, and a six-bed psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU). The centre’s “first phase” opened on schedule last November, with the older persons’ unit the first to be occupied, mainly by patients transferred from existing mental health wards at the Edith Cavell Hospital, just a few hundred metres away. Phase 1’s timely completion enabled demolition of the West Wing of the Edith Cavell Hospital to proceed on schedule. Following Phase 2’s completion this April, patients began being transferred from a variety of locations to occupy the remainder of the new Centre in late May.
A sense of home’
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
