Facility shows benefit of staying single

During a visit to the now rapidly emerging healthcare facility, located in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in a wooded hillside location in the Weald of Kent which Nigel Keen, general manager for the PFI project company, described as “the most attractive site for a hospital I have ever worked on”, HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie met key project personnel and discussed the impressive progress made to date. 

While heated debate over the wider pros and cons of single-bedded hospital accommodation will no doubt continue for some time to come, one thing is certain: that when the first phase of the new Pembury PFI hospital near Tunbridge Wells is completed later this year, and the first patients are admitted in January next, the impressive new healthcare facility will generate massive public and media interest. Not only will it be the UK’s first ever acute hospital to offer 100% single-bedroom/en suite accommodation, but with it will come the attendant challenges to established nursing and clinical practice that such a radical new model is bound to engender. Although, as we reported in an interview with the original project architect, Anshen+Allen’s John Cooper, in Health Estate Journal’s June 2008 issue, the original brief for the hospital (which is yet to be officially named) was based on only 70% of the rooms being single-bedded, between the preliminary invitation to tender and final invitation to tender stages the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust took what the architect described at the time as “the critical decision” that it should, in fact, offer 100% single-bed accommodation. At a meeting in the sizeable site offices shared by the major project partners immediately before being shown around the parts of the hospital already completed (during which I was fortunate enough to get a bird’s eye perspective from the roof), I met with several senior project team members. From the start their enthusiasm and excitement over what will be a genuine first for UK acute healthcare provision was clear, despite a number having not only spent their entire career in construction, but also now being entitled to consider themselves PFI scheme “veterans”. For regional operations director at John Laing Investments and chairman of the project company, Michael Baybutt, for instance, the Pembury scheme is his 14th PFI project so far. However, all were in agreement that the new Kent hospital was among the most exciting, challenging, and interesting construction projects they had worked on to date. 

PFI scheme ‘veterans’