The new King’s College Hospital’s critical care centre, built by McLaughlin & Harvey as part of a £68m contract, has been forced to close amid fire safety concerns about panelling on the building, the NHS Trust running the facility has said.
McLaughlin & Harvey started work on the project, which involved the construction of a new critical care unit on top of an existing theatre block as well as a new helipad on top of an adjacent 10-storey building within the live hospital campus in 2014. Work to hydraulically jack the new trussed roof structure for the critical care unit into position started in 2016.
But the first phase of the opening of the centre was delayed in November 2018 when King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust revealed that inspection work undertaken by its technical team as part of the final commissioning process had revealed issues with “defective fire management” within the unit, requiring “significant remedial work”.
McLaughlin & Harvey was instructed to provide a “robust” programme to complete the project.
But now the Trust has announced that it has closed the unit so that it can complete the outstanding remedial work within the unit itself “as well as rectify issues identified more recently”.
McLaughlin and Harvey has been contacted for comment.
