Experience invaluable at ‘live site’ upgrade

As anyone who works in the healthcare sector will know, designing and planning infrastructure upgrades on a live site can prove challenging. Not surprisingly, with the largest infrastructure upgrade the NHS has ever undertaken in Leeds, multidisciplinary engineering consultancy, AECOM, has already encountered more than its fair share of complexities. AECOM has been in the process of providing design solutions for the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust on its St James’s University Hospital and Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) sites. The infrastructure upgrade at St James’s and LGI on which the company has been working has all the traditional considerations for site safety, as well as the more unusual technical considerations of potentially explosive gas, building on, and through, an old landfill site, potential instability due to historical mine workings, re-direction of service ducts on a live site, and determining the load capacity for an area of new build above a tunnel on the A58. AECOM’s previous experience of the St James’s site, where it designed engineering solutions for the Bexley Wing, a £220 million state-of the-art cancer centre which opened in 2008, has proved useful on this project. The company is providing civil and structural engineering design solutions as part of the Laing O’Rourke P21 design team which is led by mechanical and electrical consultants, Hoare Lea, with Capita Architects.

Reasons for the infrastructure upgrade

The need to undertake such a massive infrastructure programme came about as a result of a report prepared by WS Atkins in 2004 to determine the adequacy of the electrical infrastructure at the St James’s site. A major power loss occurred during the commissioning of the report, which AECOM says “only served to highlight the importance of the improvements needed to provide sufficient spare capacity for any future increases in demand”. Craig Pamplin, the project manager for AECOM, explains the initial brief: “Project managers, Crown House Technologies, mechanical and electrical engineers, Hoare Lea, and the NHS Trust’s Estates Department, had all determined the extent of what was required in terms of the electrical upgrade, and which areas within the hospitals would be upgraded, refurbished, or designated for a new build. Therefore many of the locations of work were chosen due to electrical design suitability, and not structural or construction suitability, creating many challenges for us in our approach to finding a suitable design solution. “AECOM geotechnical and geoenvironmental teams carried out the ground investigation to determine the suitability of the proposed building sites, as well as the ground conditions for the foundation designs of all of the new buildings. It was during initial enquires that we realised that a large portion of the site to be developed had previously been worked for clay extraction, and had been backfilled with both domestic and construction wastes.”