Wellington Hospital High Dependency Unit

We built the first High Dependency Unit at Wellington Regional Hospital, completely transforming the space formerly used by the Renal department into a state-of-the-art critical care facility once the Renal team had settled in their new location.

We needed to install heavy medical pendants and patient hoists, supported by additional structural steel to the underside of the floor above. We used detailed point cloud scans, overlaying them over the model to check the proposed layout within the existing structure and services. By adding all the framing and steel studs into the model, we were able to confirm that the new structural elements would not clash with the live services before we installed them.

With the site on level five, we craned materials onto the level five rooftop and pushed them through the building, avoiding the disruption of bringing them up through the hospital.

The wards above and below our site were relocated to the new rooftop decant ward while we completed noisy structural and drainage works, giving the team a compact timeframe and hard deadline to complete the more disruptive work.

The client was delighted with the 12-bed HDU, which alleviates pressure on the ICU and emergency department with space for patients who are too unwell for a standard ward but don’t need full intensive care.