£21m London hospital expansion reaches construction milestone

A Yorkshire-based offsite construction specialist, has installed the final modules on site for a new outpatient services building at King’s College Hospital in London.

The £21m contract is Premier Modular’s largest single offsite healthcare project in its 65-year history. The project is being delivered with its construction partner Claritas.

133 steel-framed modules weighing up to 11.5 tonnes each were manufactured by Premier in Brandesburton and have now been installed on site in London using a 500-tonne crane in a complex operation.

This involved logistics planning to maintain access through the hospital campus at all times, and to co-ordinate cranage to avoid any disruption to the helipad and air ambulance helicopters. The site is highly constrained with roads to three sides and is immediately adjacent to another hospital building.

When complete later this year, the building will provide 48 consulting rooms and eight procedure rooms for a range of outpatient services, including dermatology, rheumatology, neurosciences, as well as other aspects of surgery and therapy.

Jon Wardle, chief executive of Claritas, said: “The whole project team, the Trust and our delivery partners have done a tremendous job of installing this large-scale building on an incredibly constrained site at the heart of this major hospital. Everyone involved worked hard to ensure the installation phase was completed as smoothly as possible.”

Dan Allison, Divisional Director at Premier Modular, said “When you have a hospital site as restricted as this one, it is easy to see how offsite construction really comes into its own. We are reducing the amount of plant, materials, and vehicle movements to site by moving as much work offsite as we can.

“And by constructing the building structure in the factory while the foundations were progressed on site, these new hospital facilities will be brought into use at an earlier stage, to the benefit of patient care.”

All the modules have now been installed and connected. Stage two of the construction programme will involve final fitting out and completion of the external façade, including a feature entrance with double height glazing to provide high levels of natural light for the reception and waiting area.

The project was procured through the Crown Commercial Service framework and is designed by P+HS Architects. The M&E specialists are TClarke.