Delivering upgraded and expanded facilities while maintaining patient services was again a key challenge with the Sub-Acute Unit and Day Therapy Unit project at the South West Health Campus.

The main objective of the project was to increase the capacity of these patient services in line with the growing regional population. This involved the expansion of the Sub-Acute Care Unit (SCU) area to enable improved operational physical capacity by accommodating additional beds and services; an expansion of the Day Therapy rooms to enhance the capacity of services; and, the renovation of selected areas inside existing Sub-Acute and Day Therapy buildings to improve performance of staff working areas and consultation and treatment areas.

With the SCU dealing primarily with the rehabilitation of stroke sufferers and the Day Therapy Unit dealing with a very broad range of rehabilitation scenarios, the ability to accommodate a multi-disciplinary model of care was key to the project’s success. Therefore, regular, broad and well-structured user-group meetings were undertaken throughout the design process.

These meetings were critical to understanding the nature of the services, the associated workflows and spatial requirements. We ran these user-group meetings in parallel to oversight from important operational stakeholders such as hospital management, engineering and cleaning staff.

With existing infrastructure embedded deep within the hospital campus, a carefully planned staging strategy was required to ensure the construction works could be undertaken while patient services remained operational. In total, 1,720m2 of alterations and additions were delivered, all whilst maintaining ongoing patient services and safety.