Multiple benefits of a standardised approach

Building new hospitals is complex, and schemes are often over budget, delayed, or beset with unforeseen complications during the construction phase. Fewer and fewer contractors want to take on hospital projects as a result of the risk, placing the ability to deliver new healthcare facilities at the scale and pace needed under threat. Can that risk around these projects however be reduced by standardising the design to remove the variability and give cost and programme certainty? Mott MacDonald Technical director for Healthcare, Andrew Parks, and Global lead for Industrialised Design and Construction, Ben Carlisle, both believe that taking an industrialised construction approach could do this, and more. However, taking this methodology calls for change across the healthcare sector.

To demonstrate the need to find an alternative approach, Ben Carlisle says that it is currently likely to be more profitable for construction firms to build offshore wind farms in the North Sea than it is to deliver a hospital project in a city centre.

He says: "That doesn't feel logical, but the offshore wind sector is highly modular and standardised, and, despite the offshore location, that reduces the risk. It is clear that we cannot keep using the same approach to building hospitals and expect it to deliver a dramatically different outcome. If we truly want an alternative result, then we must seek out new methods and delivery models in healthcare."