Transforming care for sick children

Currently taking shape, as part of an ambitious eight-year redevelopment of much of the site to bring it up to 21st Century standards, is a new eight-storey clinical building that will not only allow treatment of up to 20 per cent more patients annually, but will also reportedly be among London’s “greenest” buildings. Jonathan Baillie reports.

Explaining on a dedicated project website the need for the redevelopment programme, the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) for Children NHS Trust says it expects a 20 per cent increase in demand for the hospital’s services – equating to around 20,000 more patient visits a year – over the next 10 years. For a brand new hospital, equipped with 21st Century buildings and technology, such a rise in anticipated patient numbers would be pretty challenging. However, in GOSH’s case, given that a number of the hospital’s wards are now “both outdated and cramped”, and that facilities for clinicians and researchers similarly urgently require modernisation, the Trust says that, unless the estate is improved, not only will accommodating such a rise prove impossible, but that advances in technology and treatment will not be able to be so readily translated into improvements in the care of sick children who, such is its reputation, come to it from all over the world. To find out more about the redevelopment programme, I visited the site offices of BAM Construction, the main contractor for Phase 2A of project – the Morgan Stanley Clinical Building (which is scheduled to admit its first patients in early 2012). Here I discussed with the Trust’s director of redevelopment and estates Bill McGill, and construction manager at BAM Construction Richard Pateman, both how work on the new clinical facility was progressing, and the work already completed as part of a four-stage redevelopment programme. The programme’s goal, the Trust explains, is not only to allow clinical staff to “re-design” the way they work, but also to provide a greatly enhanced treatment and care environment for both patients and their families. “Looking at the redevelopment as a whole, the first major landmark was the completion of the Octav Botnar Wing (Phase 1B), in 2006,” Bill McGill began by telling me. “This new building offered daycare facilities, an orthopaedic ward, operating theatres, biomedical engineering, and an international private patient centre.” Completed in the same year, he went on to explain, was Weston House (Phase 1A), a new patient hotel which provides comfortable, modern accommodation that enables patients and their families living some distance away to attend as “daycases” when clinically appropriate, rather than being admitted as inpatients. “Weston House also provides staff training facilities, and gives us invaluable support in attracting and retaining the best staff,” Bill McGill added.

‘Incredible difference’ already made