Healy Butler Moffat

The first thing a live hospital teaches you is that it has no particular interest in your construction programme. At University Hospital Limerick , new ward accommodation had to be built in an enclosed courtyard between the Emergency and Paediatric Departments. There was no normal physical access to the site. The answer involved a light-gauge steel prefabricated system, with panels lifted by crane over the existing hospital buildings and carefully slotted into place. That sounds neat when you put it into one sentence. It was not neat. Every decision about access, lifting, noise, separation and sequencing had to sit around a hospital that was still doing what hospitals do: admitting patients, moving beds, running clinical services and dealing with whatever the day brought. Ask anyone who has project-managed a live hospital extension and they will tell you much the same thing. It is a little like renovating the kitchen while the family still expects three meals a day out of it — except ...

The strange thing about building inside a live hospital is how quickly the extraordinary becomes normal. At University Hospital Limerick, the site for a new acute ward was an enclosed courtyard between the emergency department and the paediatric department. There was no ordinary construction access. The hospital street still had to function, patients still had to move through the building, and the clinical departments on either side could not simply close while we got on with the job. The answer involved prefabricated light-gauge steel panels being lifted by crane over the live hospital and lowered into the courtyard. Watching a building arrive through the air is memorable. Watching it happen while the hospital beneath it carries on treating people is something else entirely. That project began as a fast-delivery, 16-bedroom acute care unit with an extremely tight programme and limited budget. It subsequently moved through further phases of additional accommodation. The design work wa...