Southern Cross Hospital upgrades

Our Christchurch team observed what is becoming a Christmas tradition by returning to Southern Cross over the hospital’s annual shutdown. They worked in three separate areas:

• Redeveloping the operating theatre staff changing rooms and bathrooms, stripping the space back to a bare shell, reconfiguring it, and installing new services, flooring, walls, joinery, showers and sanitary ware
• Upgrading and redecorating the operating theatre staff tearoom, with new joinery, floor coverings, lighting and updated services
• Redeveloping the Day of Surgery Admissions (DOSA) waiting area, consulting rooms, nurses’ station and bathrooms, adding three additional consulting rooms and a reception area and refurbishing the entire space

We completed part of the changing room development once the theatre staff were back from their break, partitioning off the work area with full-height hoardings, building a separate site access point, and installing temporary changing areas in storage rooms to cover the two-week overlap. The rest of the works all fitted tidily into the four-week shutdown, with staff returning to fresh new facilities.

Working while the rest of the construction industry is at the beach required meticulous planning for everything from materials to inspections. Despite the tight programme, our team made the most of every opportunity to reduce waste going to landfill, with lockers reused by the client, some windows and doors incorporated into the new design, and kitchen cabinets donated to community groups.