The Challenge:

NHS Dumfries and Galloway is the health board serving Dumfries and Galloway, one of fourteen regions of NHS Scotland. Our task was to project manage and undertake the transferral of an existing hospital’s equipment into the region’s new facility over the course of a single week.

The Project:

The Dumfries and Galloway health board had decided to reshape health services across the region, and the primary component of this was the construction of a new, state of the art £212 million hospital which would incorporate the latest healthcare technology into its design and turn the board’s vision for a ‘healing environment’ into a reality.

As with any hospital move it was vitally important that the project was undertaken with the utmost responsibility – disruption to patients and overall hospital operations would have to be kept to an absolute minimum, thus requiring speed, efficiency, and most importantly, great care.

Given our exemplary track record of successful hospital relocations, NHS Dumfries and Galloway approached us to manage the move, and we met with their team to consider what needed to be moved and to identify the services we could provide. Following these consultations we were appointed as the project managers for the move, planning and coordinating all aspects of the process, and we were also engaged to carry out the physical relocation process itself.

Our Solution:

Our first step was to develop a comprehensive move strategy and then present this to the various departments within the hospital, as well as the management and the external steering committees. For each department, we prepared a detailed move script detailing the specific timings, equipment lists, crate deliveries and collections and even packing instructions. In total we put together 50 of these scripts which were sent to and signed off by each hospital department.

Next we created a labelling strategy for the job, colour coding each item to show which part of the hospital they had originated from. We prepared detailed spreadsheets which linked to our label database and two weeks prior to the move we dispatched a team to label all of the equipment in the hospital.

With any move of this size, the exact scale and scope of the project rarely remains static, and indeed in this case a number of additional requirements arose during the weeks before the move. This is something we prepare for and thanks to our operations teams and project managers we were able to rearrange our schedules in order to account for the additional workload.

In total we transferred 12,500 items, including medical physics equipment which had to be moved to a separate area for testing before heading on to the new hospital, as well as a wide variety of other equipment. We moved 200 beds, over 3000 crates and 400 cages of store items, and to facilitate this we included night shifts for certain aspects of the job, such as the theatre move and the transfer of beds.

Finally, in order to further reduce any potential complications to such an important move, Restore Harrow Green arranged to meet with the local council and police who implemented traffic restrictions on the route in order to ensure we had easy access between the two hospitals

The move was successfully completed within the week allocated. Due to our coordinated and meticulously-planned approach, hospital operations were able to continue during the process and disruption to patients was kept to an absolute minimum. We followed strict protocols to ensure medical equipment would not be contaminated and we joined the Tactical and Operational Hospital command during the move, thus maintaining clear communications with the client at all times.

The complications of moving a hospital are extensive but the hard work and flexibility shown by NHS Dumfries & Galloway and Restore Harrow Green ensured that the process ran smoothly and the residents of the area were able to rely on the continued service of their regional health service.

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