A&E project was ‘like completing a jigsaw’

 HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie recently visited the impressive new facility, to find out more from Mansell, the Trust, and architects, Nightingale Associates, about the challenges faced during a 20-phase construction project so well planned and executed that only a single ‘stop notice’ was issued throughout the 30-month programme – and this only when a patient’s condition made it absolutely necessary.

Built in the early 1970s, the 650-bed Basildon University Hospital serves a population of around 400,000 in south-west Essex, in conjunction with the Orsett Hospital in Thurrock. The Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals (BTUH) NHS Foundation Trust also operates The Essex Cardiothoracic Centre (HEJ – March 2008), a state-of-the-art tertiary cardiothoracic care centre located on the Basildon site, which was designed by the same architects, Nightingale Associates, that worked on the new A&E and Fracture Clinic project (and was completed in April 2007 by BAM). The project to re-model and rebuild an A&E Department that sees around 90,000 patients every year, and the adjacent Fracture Clinic, followed hard on the heels of the August 2009 completion of a separate £5 m ProCure21 contract to enlarge and improve the hospital’s adjoining Endoscopy Unit. The endoscopy facility’s comprehensive re-design – it was ‘too cramped’ and only had three endoscopy rooms – was again undertaken by Nightingale Associates, with Mansell as main contractor. The Trust’s estates and facilities director, Jenny Galpin, elaborated: “Two of the key goals of enlarging the Endoscopy Department were to enable the expansion of the bowel screening programme at the Basildon University Hospital, and to release space to update the existing Accident and Emergency Department. Working closely with our estates team to a plan jointly developed with Nightingale Associates, Mansell created the new endoscopy facilities by extending the front of the hospital, refurbishing an existing ward, and using some additional courtyard space. This set the platform for expanding the A&E facility. “The space freed up by relocating part of the ‘old’ endoscopy facilities from what is now our new paediatric A&E Department, to the new endoscopy facility, in turn allowed us temporarily to re-locate our ground floor administrative offices there. This meant that Mansell could then begin the task, in one of the early phases of the 20-phase rebuild programme, of demolishing the previous ground floor offices at the front of the hospital, and building, in their place, the carcass of a ground floor extension and new first floor above.”

First-floor office extension