Waterfall House
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Location: Birmingham
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Sector: Health
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Division: Regional Building, Engineering
Tilbury Douglas worked with Birmingham Children’s Hospital as part of the P21+ Framework to deliver Waterfall House, a new four-storey clinical building over 7500m2 and comprising 400 rooms, located on the former hospital car park adjacent to the existing operational hospital.
The completed building provides the following specialist accommodation for children:
- Ground floor: A new pioneering rare diseases unit to provide focussed support for young people with rare and complex diseases. The space has a bright and airy courtyard café, breastfeeding room and a chill out space and is linked to the hospital’s existing Victorian building
- First floor: Outpatients department including chemotherapy chairs, treatment rooms and general consulting rooms
- Second floor: Inpatient department including children’s and teenage cancer wards and bedrooms
- Third floor: Three ambulatory operating theatres and ancillary rooms with the rooftop plant located above
The Trust needed to bring together disparate facilities from across the existing outdated estate and by providing three new ambulatory theatres, day care surgery capacity was increased and consolidated efficiency in the provision and management of surgical services.
Each of the four floors was designed in close consultation with both staff and patients and boasts features such as staff breakout rooms, single en-suite rooms, play areas and a teenage common room for cancer patients.
Large windows and internal glazed screens were used to maximise daylight with the rainscreen cladding on the main façades and high quality fit out used to provide a modern contemporary feel.
At a glance...
£27m
Project value
July 2018
Completion date
NHS
Client
Long term flexibility
The Trust required the building to have long term flexibility so that it could be adopted if the main hospital relocated in the future. Tilbury Douglas developed a steel frame structure to aid off site fabrication and a standard room layout which provided flexibility within the building.
The rooftop packaged plantroom and the use of prefabricated risers and service runs helped to reduce deliveries to site and maintain the smooth operation of the hospital activities. This complemented the complex M&E services associated with a clinical facility of this type allowing a high quality solution to be delivered.
Successfully managing a challenging site
The extremely constrained site located in central Birmingham, adjacent to the operational hospital meant that the phasing and management of deliveries was crucial to the success of the project.
Given the size of the site, one of our first challenges was finding room to locate our site accommodation. We overcame this by using our internal temporary works team to design a structure that enabled us to stock the cabins four-storeys high and maximise the space on site. With the site so tight to the rest of the operational hospital, we decided to use a luffing jib crane instead of a saddleback jib crane in order to reduce the amount of oversailing over the surrounding buildings. This crane was subsequently named Craney McCrane Face as part of a competition between children attending the hospital, raising the profile of the new facilities.
A further challenge, during early excavation works, was the discovery of exhumed human remains on the site which had previously served as a burial site. This unexpected find (the history of the site was known but it was understood that all remains had been removed under a previous contract) meant that works had to be delayed whilst archaeologists were brought in to remove the remains.
Working collaboratively with the client team
During the second stage, the Project Team co-located with the client team to enable a true partnership working approach to develop. The client team developed the detailed brief through a programme of End User Workshops and were involved at all key decision making stages. This successful working relationship has led to us tendering and securing a number of additional projects for the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
Tilbury Douglas agreed to a ‘not to be exceeded figure’ prior to carrying out the market testing exercise. This gave the Trust the confidence to authorise an early enabling works package improving the overall programme whilst also meeting their budget.
Our partners
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Structural Engineer: Couch Consulting Engineers
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M&E Engineer: Hoare Lee
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Architect: BDP