Wrightington Hospital
RPS provided building services engineering for a 5,457m2 two-storey new build surgical and inpatient ward at Wrightington Hospital. The project comprised of: four table barn operating theatre, two 28-bed surgical wards, surgical admissions unit, post-operative recovery ward and energy centre.
Key details
Project Name
Wrightington Hospital – Phase 1
Client
Wrightington, Wigan & Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
Location
Wigan, UK
Services provided
- Building services engineering
Challenge
The state-of-the-art barn theatre design allows for four operations to take place simultaneously in the same room, by utilising privacy screens. This required an innovative mechanical electrical and plumbing (MEP) design to ensure that airborne bacteria would not spread and to allow climate control in each bay.
We successfully reassured the client that the ‘barn theatre’ could not only be met, but that we could exceed their design requirements and their high clinical commissioning standards with HTM compliance.
Overall we needed to deliver an environment that supports post-operative recovery.
Solution
The MEP design allows each operating bay in the barn theatre to have its own clean air enclosure, so that multiple operations can take place concurrently. This was achieved by our engineers specifying an ultra-clean air ceiling canopy for each table which protects the room from airborne bacteria, by ensuring a constant supply of fresh, filtered clean air into the theatre. We also designed a heating and ventilation system with fully flexible controls allowing the individual surgical teams to control their own bays in the barn theatre.
Hospital satisfaction is about patients, their experience and how fast they get better. The new Wrightington hospital extension has delivered an outstanding patient environment that promotes post-operative recovery.
Staff have expressed that their working environment has increased tranquillity, patients are sleeping better and are more willing to exercise, with a reduction in refusal rates.
The project is a Procure21+ BIM Early Adopter of the pioneering use of ‘repeatable rooms’, which saved the amount of time that clinical teams had to spend designing the spaces.
Project statistics:
area of new unit
bed-spaces across two new surgical wards
barn operating theatre
“We have gone from nightly complaints and nurses responding repeatedly to call alarms to having to walk round and check why the patients are silent and sleeping soundly.”
Anita Baker, Matron/Specialist Services Division