Keeping heart and kidney care running at Middlemore while a new lab and unit were built around it.
Cardiac Catheter Laboratory & Dialysis Unit
Middlemore HospitalMiddlemore Hospital needed a new cardiac catheter laboratory and an expanded high-dependency dialysis unit, serving more than 100 seriously unwell people a week. The work added a two-level extension to the existing Scott building and enlarged the dialysis unit, all of it inside a fully operating hospital.
RCP provided the bridge between the contractor's programme and the hospital's clinical needs, coordinating more than twenty construction stages within the live environment. When the pandemic hit, the staging had to be recalibrated daily around isolation rooms and COVID-positive patients.
A planned summer shutdown of the catheter lab fell through when other hospitals and the ambulance service were overwhelmed. Four weeks out, RCP devised another way: a temporary nurses' station in the atrium and a new opening straight into the catheter theatre, so operations continued without access to the usual ward areas. The hospital lost three weeks instead of three months.
The cardiac catheter theatre and dialysis extension opened on time and on budget, a spacious treatment area for the community.
