New pictures of the fully completed £500 m facility at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton have been released, just ahead of the building taking its first inpatients this week.
The ‘3Ts’ development is transforming the Royal Sussex County Hospital, one of the oldest in England, with a three-phase plan to improve services and provide a new regional centre for Trauma, Teaching, and Tertiary Care. The new images were released by McBains, the construction consultancy providing construction supervision, cost management, and project management services for its delivery. The newly completed Stage 1 – the first and largest of the three-stage programme – will see the opening of 62,000 m2 of clinical and support accommodation in the new Louisa Martindale Building, which has been built by Laing O'Rourke, and named after the first female GP in Brighton, who became one of the world’s leading gynaecologists.
The redevelopment will ‘take the front half of the hospital from the 19th to 21st century’ – by facilitating the decanting of services from the oldest acute ward building in the NHS (the Barry Building, which opened in 1828) to England’s newest clinical building.
There will be over 30 wards and departments, new diagnostic and theatre capacity, and increased capacity for the departments with high demand, including neurosciences, stroke services, and intensive care.
The redevelopment includes around 200 single bedrooms throughout the upper floors, as well as four-bed bays, and specialist rooms housing radiopharmacy and major medical equipment, including MRIs. Most wards will feature around five times as much space per bed as is currently available. While currently all neuroscience services are spread over multiple sites, the new development will unify all services under one roof in the new Louisa Martindale Building. This will also house the intensive care and high dependency units on the same floor to ensure life-saving care can be administered as efficiently as possible.
The scheme will also see the relocation of the 165-year-old, Grade 2 listed chapel interior – the oldest operating chapel in a healthcare facility in the UK – from the Barry Building into the new building.
Steve Brooker, Project director at McBains, said: “We are delighted to be able to unveil the first new pictures of the fully completed Louisa Martindale Building, which will significantly enhance patient care for the region. An incredible amount of hard work has gone into ensuring the successful completion of the building, and it is a true testament of the power of collaboration and teamwork that we’ve managed to achieve this incredible milestone. We now look ahead to its transformation into a working hospital, and its vital role in transforming the lives of patients, staff, and visitors.”
Stage 2 of the re-development is currently in the pre-building (pre-construction services agreement) stage, with McBains leading the consultancy of the planning stages. Stage 2 will remove the existing vacant buildings, and construct a new Sussex Cancer Centre, providing 29,000 m2 of clinical and support accommodation, ‘ensuring far more availability’ for current and future patients, and increasing the number of chemotherapy beds and radiotherapy machines.
