Bassetlaw Emergency Care Village

View More

Bassetlaw Hospital needed a bigger emergency department, but the existing one couldn’t close for a day. Ambulances kept arriving, patients kept being treated, and an outpatient endoscopy unit nearby stayed open throughout. The new Emergency Care Village had to be built around and inside a hospital that never stopped.

CAD21 took the scheme from its RIBA Stage 2 business case through to completion as the building services designer: a new-build emergency department with resus, majors and minors, plus a refurbishment turning the old mental health wards into a new Child Assessment Unit and Acute Treatment Centre. The hardest part was the endoscopy unit, which shared services with the very spaces being rebuilt around it. Rather than guess at what ran behind the walls of a building changed over decades, we surveyed it properly at Stage 2, which let the Estates team plan a single controlled week-long shutdown to switch the heating and relocate the air handling plant, instead of carrying that risk through the whole build.

Energy came out of the same decisions: air source heating and roof-mounted PV for the new department, demand-led control so clinical spaces aren’t conditioned when empty, and pipework and power sized so the refurbished building can swap its gas boiler for a heat pump when funding allows. The scheme reached BREEAM Excellent on the new build and cut carbon by 20%.