Urgent Care

Royal United Hospitals, Bath

RUH Urgent Care is a new drop in facility replacing a practice in the city centre. Open all hours it has five consultancy rooms and a sluice room. The new build is bound by the existing Accident and Emergency on two sides, an existing free standing wall on the third side and is free on the final side. The construction is single storey timber frame with glulam beams to create the large open reception space. The building links into accident and emergency on both sides. The key challenges were to design a building which could be constructed in twelve weeks with minimum disruption to the existing buildings. To ensure the building was delivered on time the major risk was the installation of all wet trades before Christmas. We proposed a screed free ground floor construction which made this possible. We had to design and detail all the timber connections as hidden to suit this form of construction. We also worked hard to minimise the disruption to the existing buildings, challenging the need to remove existing walls and therefore create new openings within the existing buildings. As a result the final design involved no new lintels to the existing building but utilised the existing openings, minimising disruption within the working space. The building was successfully delivered on time and to budget leading to our appointment for other projects at the hospital.