Building a hospital in a global pandemic

In 2018, BESIX’s subsidiary in Australia, BESIX Watpac, was awarded the contract for the Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Hospital Stage 2 and Medical Imaging facility in Sydney. Delivering a major health redevelopment in a live hospital environment is challenging – to do so in the middle of a global pandemic is next level. Here’s how our team down-under confronted these challenges.

BESIX Watpac achieved this outcome through close collaboration with hospital administrators to maintain regular operations while keeping patients, employees and site workers safe.

A full refurbishment and expansion of the most critical medical units at the hospital were well underway when Covid-19 struck early this year. The team’s excellent preparation helped to manage the complexity caused by the pandemic easier. Together with the client and multiple user groups, a five-stage delivery approach was developed that focused on procuring, decanting, demolishing and delivering each specialised department.

As Coronavirus spread, the site team developed and implemented a Covid Management Plan including social distancing, daily inspections, constant disinfection of high touch areas, task observations and extensive risk assessments.

As well as being in constant contact with hospital staff, the project team hosted weekly information sessions with subcontractors to keep track of Covid safe measures. Even with the extra precautions, the team went above and beyond to deliver this multi-units project five months ahead of schedule.

The next challenge will be completing the remaining levels of the seven-storey clinical services building in addition to the first stage of refurbishing the live Emergency Department.