Major Angela Laycock: planning a hospital build
Major Angela Laycock and her team supported NHS staff and civilian contractors to design and plan the construction of the new NHS Nightingale hospital located in the National Exhibition Centre (NEC), Birmingham
As a part of the response to the Coronavirus outbreak, the NEC has been transformed into NHS Nightingale Birmingham.
A team comprised of NHS workers, private contractors and British Army troops are working together to initially build 500 bed spaces.
We hear from Major Angela Laycock who is the officer commanding the team of Royal Engineers that helped to plan the construction of the new NHS hospital. 👇
Last week we were tasked to come up to Birmingham NEC as a military assessment team to assess whether this area was suitable to be used as another Nightingale hospital for the NHS.
The NEC is used to organising big events, it normally has its own power capacity and plugs all of the different things in that a normal event would require.
What we are doing here is quite different — here we’re trying to utilise existing infrastructure as much as possible, whereas military field hospitals come with all its own equipment; its own power generation units, its own cables and own electrical equipment.
The NEC will also need oxygen supply and will need lots of different bed spaces to care for critical care patients as well as patients that require oxygen whilst recovering.
So far there hasn’t been a huge amount of military personnel involved on this project, there’s been a planning support team already in place, they’re the people that work at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine.
They are already embedded with University Hospital Birmingham, we’ve worked with them and the NHS staff at the hospital to try and capture their clinical requirements that we then fit in the facility here.
I was also called out to help out at Whaley bridge when the Toddbrook Reservoir collapsed and we have also helped on numerous flooding events over the last few months.
It’s been great to work as a small team, actually utilising the trades that we’ve all got through the military and through the Royal Engineers, to use them to good effect to help get the NHS ahead of the game and further up the planning process.
The final thing to say about us working with the NHS is; the staff have been absolutely brilliant! Us as the military, we’re used to being able to follow orders and quickly go and do something slightly out of the ordinary in a very short time frame.
They usually have a year to plan hospitals and some of their refurb projects. For them to suddenly have days to go from an event centre to a hospital location, I think has been brilliant.
I would like to congratulate all of the people that I’ve worked with and it’s been a pleasure to spend the last week trying to plan all of this with them.
