Complex logistics for Trondheim facility

 The new St Olavs Hospital will be Norway’s first 100 per cent single-room healthcare facility, and is set to have close links with Trondheim’s Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Designed to be as ‘patientcentred’ as possible from the outset, it incorporates a number of innovative technologies for enhancing and automating activities ranging from pill ‘picking’ and distribution, to logistics and waste disposal, as HEJ, and Bjørn Bakken, project manager, logistics, at hospital development company, Helsebygg Midt-Norge, explain.

Occupying a total floor area of some 223,000m2, and located in Trondheim’s central ‘downtown’ Øya area, the new St Olavs Hospital has been constructed for two ‘end customers’ – the hospital itself, and the Medical Faculty at the city’s Norwegian University of Science of Technology (or NTNU), which will occupy around 75% and 25% respectively. Built in three phases, the third due for completion by late 2013 (all phases to date have been delivered to date and below budget), the NOK 12.6 billion (£1.36 bn) healthcare development has been funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Health, and the country’s Ministry of Education and Research. Overall responsibility for all elements of designing, constructing, and equipping the various new buildings lies with Helsebygg Midt-Norge (The Hospital Development Project for Central Norway). While hospital facilities account for around 75% of the total floor space, the close links – both physical and academic – with the NTNU’s Faculty of Medicine will see more medical students than hospitalised patients on the site at any given time. Indeed, as Helsebygg Midt- Norge puts it, ‘hospital and university areas are totally integrated throughout the campus’.

Background and history