St Helens DTC

Completed in 2008, the £100m St Helens Diagnostic & Treatment Centre (DTC) signals the future for a significant proportion of modern healthcare provision. Acting as an outpatients-style treatment centre, rather than a 24/7 hospital, it is designed around a dramatic central atrium which makes the whole building intuitively easy to move around, while being sympathetic to, and integrating with, the local landscape. The overall concept is based on maximising contact with nature light and art thereby creating a hospital which does not have an institutional healthcare feel but is a relaxing space more in keeping with public cultural facilities. The brown field site (a filled in quarry) has also been extensively landscaped to create a welcoming parkland setting which is enjoyed by staff and visitors alike. The project features something which is often missing from major projects – cooperative input from ‘end-users’ including nurses, doctors and patients. As a result, the building has a welcoming environment which is intuitively easy to understand and use. Patient pathways have been designed to be as short as possible while a centralised reception and administration area manages the whole building from a location immediately adjacent to the main entrance. Individual clinic waiting areas have also been combined into a light and welcoming internal atrium filled with natural light and enjoying views into attractively landscaped courtyards. Key benefits of the design strategy include: • Minimised travel distances for patients and staff; • A modular design concept, which maximises flexibility and adaptability; • Clear intuitive way finding; • Each clinic has a 'meet & greet' touch-down point and naturally lit waiting spaces with views into attractively landscaped courtyards; • A high quality entrance café providing refreshments for patients, visitors and staff, and complimenting the larger restaurant on the lower ground floor; • A total of 50 general consult/exam rooms, in three 12-room clusters and one 14-room cluster, with all clusters capable of being subdivided to maximise clinic scheduling flexibility, and which can also be used flexibly, between specialties, to optimise their use. The DTC involved a host of innovative building and design processes that are changing the way we plan, design and build hospitals and healthcare centres across the UK. From off-site construction of bathrooms to a pioneering building shell manufacturing process, the processes ensured that huge time savings were made on the construction programme while also raising the building’s longevity past the 60 year mark. With Taylor Woodrow (Vinci) as the design and build contractor, the offsite construction was undertaken by a number of key members of their supply chain. These included NG Bailey, which fabricated a significant proportion of the engineering services from its £5 million, 53,500 sq ft facility in Bradford; and Panaloc, which manufactured the various 'wet area' rooms or pods, at its hi-tech manufacturing facility in Manchester. The concept for the offsite construction process was simple – construct complex features such as piping, bathrooms and boiler rooms in an offsite CADCAM driven standalone format. These ‘pods’ were then simply slotted into the building, resulting in reduced onsite congestion, improved health and safety, lessened environmental impact, quicker project delivery and improved co-ordination between plumbers, designers etc. What’s more, everything was completely pre-tested to ensure improved quality while sustainable principles were consistently applied - including the packaging in which the pods are delivered to site. 90% of high-level engineering services were also prefabricated offsite. In fact, a team of just six was able to complete a staggering 200m of fully-functioning and wired corridor in less than a week. As is often the case with innovative projects such as these, what might seem like a minor point is also highly significant. Leaking water is a curse on any building, especially hospitals - recent estimates assert that historically 90% of hospital shower rooms have failed within the first year. Now, with the computer cutting and fitting of the precisely designed pods, the seals and materials will remain in top shape for at least 60 years.