New Children’s Hospital completed and hand...

SRV GROUP PLC                        PRESS RELEASE                                      18 MAY 2018 AT 13.00

New Children’s Hospital completed and handed over to client ahead of schedule

Construction of the New Children’s Hospital at Meilahti, Helsinki has been completed. The project’s main contractor SRV has handed over the hospital to its future user, the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) at the end of April, two months ahead of schedule. The original target date for completion was the end of June. The New Children’s Hospital will open in autumn 2018 and it will replace the out-dated premises of the present Children’s Hospital and Children’s Castle Hospital.

Construction of the New Children’s Hospital began in August 2014 with earth construction and excavation work. Preparations for the future commissioning of the building have already been made during the construction phase, for example by installing fixed hospital equipment while construction was ongoing. During construction, the site has been visited for familiarisation and orientation by over 1,000 representatives of the future user of the premises. Following the hand-over at the end of April, the user has intensified its preparations for the future use of the hospital by patients.

“From the very start, the determining factor in the New Children’s Hospital construction project has been cooperation. Indeed, the project originally got off the ground thanks to the cooperation of donors. Construction began and advanced through the excellent cooperation of the developer, users, designers, contractors and over 300 subcontractors. This has truly been a joint effort, and that’s why this is a very special project not only for SRV but also for the history of Finnish hospital construction. The New Children’s Hospital has been in many ways technically challenging construction project, and when the work began the plans had been finalised only to an exceptionally low degree. Ultimately, however, particularly due to the effective cooperation between those involved, we managed to hand over the hospital ahead of schedule. Many thanks are due to everyone who participated in the project,” says SRV’s Project Manager, Mirja Serenius.

The New Children’s Hospital has eight floors above ground, a basement, and a machine room floor located on the roof. The hospital will have within it a stunning 2,069 rooms, including 12 operating rooms, 16 intensive care units, 118 wards and 220 consultation or rehabilitation rooms. The floor area of the building is 48,000 square meters, equivalent to six football pitches. The internal volume of the hospital (230,000 m³) is equivalent to two Finnish Parliament buildings. The hospital’s imposing façade is decorated with 180 colourful glass panels and a total of 13,000 ceramic planks. During the entire construction period, more than 3,600 people worked on the site for a total of 700 person-years.

The frame implementation method selected for the hospital combined cast-in-place and prefabricated element options, which enabled the frame to be erected quickly. The frame was made to be flexibly modifiable, so that in the future the premises can be modified according to need. During construction, there was a strong emphasis on moisture and cleanliness management.

“To ensure that the New Children’s Hospital would be as safe and healthy as possible for its future users, moisture and dust management during construction was extremely important. The building materials selected included the cleanest materials and a concrete grade that dried fast. An important factor was the rapid closure of the shell of the building, so that interior work could be carried out right from the beginning, protected from the weather. A Healthy Building consultant participated in the project, and the drying of all floor structures was checked by a third party before installation of floor surfacing commenced. A more demanding construction cleanliness class was complied with during construction, in order that dust-creating work did not take place in the same section during the installation of ventilation ducts, for example” says Site Manager, Matti Julin.

SRV’s strong role as a hospital builder is reflected not only in the now-completed New Children’s Hospital, but also in other projects under way, such as the Siltasairaala Hospital in Helsinki, the new building project in the front yard at TAYS Central Hospital in Tampere, and Central Finland’s Hospital Nova in Jyväskylä. The total value of the hospital and healthcare projects being built by SRV, after the completion of the New Children’s Hospital, is EUR 703 million.

“The New Children’s Hospital is an excellent example of a challenging project in which open cooperation, careful advance planning and appropriate solutions found through good teamwork have helped achieve tight targets. SRV has expertise in hospital and healthcare buildings, accumulated over the years in often challenging projects. This, in addition to cooperation, has helped us develop operating practices and solutions expressly suited to hospitals,” says SRV’s Juha Toimela, SVP, Operations in Finland.

Further information:
Juha Toimela, SVP, Operations in Finland, tel. [phone], [e-mail]
Mirja Serenius, Project Manager, tel. [phone], [e-mail]
Matti Julin, Site Manager, tel. [phone], [e-mail] 
Heidi Tetteh, Communications manager, tel. [phone], [e-mail]

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