Pembury Hospital

A new hospital at Pembury near Tunbridge Wells in Kent is set to be the UK’s first large acute hospital with 100% single in-patient rooms. Laing O’Rourke Construction is the main contractor for this £227m project which was signed off by the Department of Health and HM Treasury.

The new 512 bed Pembury Hospital will replace the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust’s existing Pembury and Kent & Sussex Hospitals, which was built in the 1920s and parts of the building date back to Victorian times.

The new hospital will have 65,000 square metres of floor space and will be seven stories high. It will include emergency surgery facilities, orthopaedics, a women and children’s zone, day case theatres and outpatient services. Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust has said that the clinical environment will be designed with patient safety and infection control procedures in mind. Each patient bedroom will therefore be designed to minimise slips trips and slips and the door to each en-suite bathroom will be on the same wall as the bed. This means that patients will  not have to cross an open floor area to visit the bathroom.

Anshen and Allen were the architects on this project and the design will also make the most of the hospital’s location to maximise views of the surrounding landscape.

One of the challenges while constructing the new hospital was the cramped site with limited working space. Testing revealed that the sand encountered on site had a very high internal angle of friction so the Laing O’Rourke’s team used Percussion Driven Earth Anchors stabilise the slope. Billington Structures fabricated and erected the structural steelwork for the portal frame and the roof steel on the building.

With all of its modern facilities delivering the best care to patients, the new hospital will be a flagship for Kent and Sussex Hospitals.