King’s College Hospital, London

Impact Group UK have been awarded the Hospital Wall Protection Package at the new £21m contract awarded to Premier Modular Ltd for the offsite construction of a 3,450sqm, four-storey modular healthcare building.

The use of an offsite solution for this project is ensuring faster delivery and earlier occupation to the benefit of patient care. It is also radically reducing disruption to staff and patients and the surrounding residential community during it construction.

Stephen Hatcher, Project Manager, Associate, P+HS Architects

“The building was designed to minimise impact on the environment over its life and is targeting a BREEAM excellent rating. It will have areas of green roof to encourage biodiversity, a highly insulated building fabric to reduce heat loss and running costs, energy-efficient ventilation and electric air source heat pump system for heating, and solar panels for electricity generation.”

THE OFFSITE SOLUTION

The £21m contract was awarded to Premier for the offsite construction of a 3,450sqm, four-storey modular healthcare building.

The use of an offsite solution for this project is ensuring faster delivery and earlier occupation to the benefit of patient care. It is also radically reducing disruption to staff and patients and the surrounding residential community during it construction.

CHALLENGES

• High degree of energy efficiency to reduce carbon emissions
• Compliance with the current and emerging London Plan
• A highly restricted site on a live hospital campus. The new building has access roads to three sides and is immediately adjacent to the Normanby Building.
• A short build programme to bring the facilities into use as fast as possible, to the benefit of patient care
• The requirement to avoid any disruption to the air ambulance during the building installation phase.

CAREFUL LOGISTICS PLANNING

132 steel-framed modules weighing up to 11.5 tonnes each were installed using a 500-tonne crane in a complex operation.

This involved careful logistics planning to maintain access through the hospital campus at all times, and to co-ordinate cranage to avoid any disruption to the helipad and air ambulance helicopters.

THE FACILITY

The new outpatient services building will provide 48 purpose-designed consultation rooms and eight procedure rooms for a range of services, including dermatology, rheumatology, respiratory, neurosciences, pain management, and urology as well as other aspects of surgery and therapies.

EXCEEDING TARGETS FOR ENERGY EFFICIENCY

The building had stringent requirements for energy efficiency in compliance with the London Plan and new SAP 10 carbon factors, to reduce emissions by:

• At least 15 per cent from non-renewable measures
• By 35 per cent overall in the final building.

The project has achieved a total reduction of 48.16 per cent of regulated carbon emissions using a combination of low carbon measures and energy from renewables:

• Enhanced building fabric specification with high levels of insulation to reduce heat loss and running costs
• Highly energy efficient system for precise heating and cooling and using heat recovery
• An efficient radiant panel system powered by air source heat pumps and as an alternative to radiator heating
• Hot water provided using a bivalent system – 65 per cent from air source heat pumps
• High efficacy LED lighting throughout with daylight dimming control to rooms with windows
• A photovoltaic array of solar panels to generate around 45kWp of electricity output.

The new building is designed in compliance with BREEAM 2018 Ene01 excellent requirements and will have areas of green roof to encourage biodiversity.

The offsite construction of the building structure also enhances the building’s sustainability credentials – with precision manufacturing to reduce heat loss, fewer vehicle movements to site, and zero waste to landfill.