State-of-the-art facilities designed and built by Costain are coming into service at Cheltenham General Hospital as the Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust improves its services for its patients.

The £13.5 million St Luke’s Wing Phase 2 was officially opened in July, while a building housing a linear accelerator enhancing services for cancer treatment is due for completion in early September.

The four-storey St Luke's wing extension houses stroke and rehabilitation wards, plus an intensive care and high dependency unit. Project manager Kevin Miners

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explained that the new structure was slotted into a gap between two existing buildings and then linked in to existing services all within an extremely tight area.

Working on a 'live' hospital site naturally meant minimising noise, dust and disruption, with much work on the 82-week job taking place at weekends and late at

night.

Mr Miners said: "There was a lot of close liaison with the hospital trust. We were connecting to a lot of existing services, and had to break in to their live systems."

The second building, a two-storey structure housing a Linear Accelerator, features a concrete 'bunker' designed to house the accelerator, which emits radiation as it is used in cancer treatment.

Construction Manager Alex Garwood-Gowers said: "We built big concrete boxes, effectively, with walls up to 2.4 metres thick. The concrete was of higher than normal density, achieved by adding magnetite, a type of iron oxide. The floor, walls and roof of the bunker each had to be completed in single pours, to prevent any joints that could allow radiation to leak."

(CD/KMcA)