A ceremony marked a key milestone at a new diagnostics centre in Thurrock, Essex, with Jen Craft MP and James McMurdock MP laying the final bricks in the project’s construction.
Thurrock Community Diagnostic Centre (CDC), which is due to open in the summer, will provide a wide range of essential diagnostic services to the local community. This will speed up access to vital healthcare capabilities while reducing waiting times and leading to faster diagnosis for patients.
The new state-of-the-art centre is currently being built by Morgan Sindall Construction’s Essex business and will be run by Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust in collaboration with key healthcare providers across the integrated care board / region.
The tier one contractor was appointed to the project by Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust via the NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) framework.
The construction activity has included the refurbishment of a 1,100 m2 building into new consulting rooms and staff support spaces. An existing single-storey building has also been demolished and replaced with a new infill building to house X-ray rooms, CT, and MRI scanners.
When complete, the CDC will offer CT, MRI, and ultrasound scans, echocardiography, blood tests, X-rays, and lung checks. An extra 75,000 appointments will be offered at the centre each year, with patients able to schedule checks seven days per week.
Morgan Sindall has liaised closely with Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust throughout the development and employed its Intelligent Solutions approach to ensure the project meets the needs of the hospital throughout its design, construction, and operation.
This approach included designing specialist areas and arranging work and deliveries to minimise disruption in what is quite a tight building area. Careful scheduling and organisation was especially critical when carrying out road widening and car park works, due to the effect this could have on the nearby residential areas. The result of this activity saw a significant improvement in the flow of traffic.
Other key challenges the team managed included constructing a faraday cage around the MRI room and lead lining around the X-ray and CT rooms, which are required due to the radiation emitted by the onsite equipment. The nature of this work means sub-contractors and tradespeople must be sequenced in a different order to normal to account for the additional lead and aluminium building components.
Morgan Sindall collaborated with Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust to ensure the new facility is designed, built and operated as sustainably as possible. This saw Morgan Sindall undertake its 10 Tonne Carbon Challenge multiple times, leading to an overall saving of 858 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Achieving this included omitting medical gas pipework as part of the MEP strategy, redesigning the building’s upstands from concrete to timber, and improving the buildability of the roof-level cover.
The single change that most reduced the facility’s carbon emissions was modifying the specification of the three Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs). This resulted in a carbon saving of 510 tonnes, which is the equivalent of heating 189 UK homes for a year.
The carbon savings were calculated utilising CarboniCa, Morgan Sindall’s digital carbon calculation tool. CarboniCa allowed the project team to estimate, manage, and reduce carbon emissions throughout the building’s design, construction, and life cycle.
Ryan Liversage, Area Director for Morgan Sindall Construction in Essex, said: “The final bricklaying ceremony is an exciting moment in the development of Thurrock’s new Community Diagnostic Centre, as it shows how close we are to opening up this fantastic facility. Once complete, the centre will deliver a wide range of vital health and well-being benefits for the local area, with cutting-edge healthcare capabilities and the ability to offer over 75,000 appointments each year.
“At Morgan Sindall, we’ve been hard at work on a number of CDC projects and have been able to draw on this experience to develop a tailored, high performance healthcare facility. What’s more, our sustainable, carbon cutting approach to construction aligns with Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust’s environmental commitment, which has made for a collaborative and innovative approach that’s drastically reduced the building’s carbon emissions.”
