RP Infrastructure

The Queensland Government identified a need to expand Caboolture Hospital to respond to the current and future healthcare needs of the community, with the population expected to increase 51% by 2031.

The RP Infrastructure (RPI) team was engaged in late 2019 to undertake project management, programming and act as the Principal’s Representative on the Caboolture Hospital Redevelopment.Project.

Project Overview

The Redevelopment includes the construction of new facilities and refurbishment of spaces within the existing hospital, covering an overall floor area of approximately 32,000 sqm.

The new five-storey Clinical Services Building and the new Multi-Storey Car Park are situated at the front of the hospital between the existing hospital and McKean Street, occupying the space previously used for public parking. Construction commenced in mid-2020.

The new facilities include:

• A new and expanded Emergency Department
• 20-bed Rehabilitation Unit
• 10-bed Palliative Care Unit
• 14-bed Geriatric Evaluation and Management Unit
• 32-bed Medical Ward
• 10-bed Intensive Care Unit
• 6 Operating Theatres and 4 Stage One Recovery Spaces
• 8-bed Cardiac Care Unit
• 4-bed Chest Pain Assessment Unit and 16-bed Medical Ward
• A mix of approximately 1,080 multi-storey and at-grade parking spaces and electric vehicle charging bay

The refurbishment within the existing hospital comprises:

• Enhanced and expanded special care nursery with 15 bays
• Medical day stay unit
• Upgraded and expanded morgue
• Expanded medical records facility, pharmacy and pathology
• New main entry, café and visitor lounge.

Our Role

Our team, as part of the Metro North Team, worked with the Managing Contractor and its designers in progressing the Design Development to finalise a GCS Offer and we are overseeing the delivery of the project until completion.

Key Challenges

Collaboration with project partners included development and implementation of an innovative Proof-of-Concept Lab (POC Lab) for the testing of the numerous systems to be installed and integrated in Caboolture Hospital. Engineering network systems requiring different suppliers with proprietary communications protocols were encouraged to test elements or components of their systems. This initiative included control and data systems related to facility security and access control, emergency generators and essential / non-essential power, building services including air conditioning and central plant, the Building Management Systems, nurse call and emergency systems such as fire. The POC Lab was very successful in resolving ICT, hardware connection and integration challenges well in advance. It has also led to pre-approvals from Queensland Health where components could be pre-tested, significantly reducing the time required to commission and hand over the facilities.

Our work on Caboolture Hospital provided an opportunity to develop a Program Management model exemplar for future health infrastructure capital projects. We developed a dashboard reporting system tailored to programs of work or detailed projects. This Power BI Interactive Dashboard consolidates program, cost, risk and issues reporting into an interactive and intuitive tool. It can assist Project Control Group and Steering Committees to distil complex project data and present it in a manner which enables executive management to review and understand progress and key risks.

Our team also facilitated workshops with the Queensland Health team to explain the roles and responsibilities of the MC contract. The workshop detailed the broad risk allocation between the parties, the project phases and timing of key milestones, together with examples of how the MC and the client-side project team manage the project delivery. The workshops assisted greatly in providing a combined understanding of the MC delivery process and the documentation was used as the basis of on-site updates to explain activities and deliverables required by the client-side team to integrate with the MC process.

The RPI team also planned and undertook a sustainability workshop which assessed:

• Construction and demolition waste management to agreed targets, diverted from landfill and then recycled.
• Airtightness – with a focus on quality of the façade to improve air conditioning efficiency and energy usage.
• Tracking performance against self-assessed 4-Star Green Star ratings
• Adoption of Green and Healthy Hospitals principles
• Achieving energy performance 10% better than building code National Construction Code (NCC) 2019 minimum requirements with a pathway to get to 15% improvement.