Welconstruct was appointed to build the facility by Capital Projects, in association with Estates Design and Technical Services, a design and project administrator. The refurbishment programme took ten months with the facility starting operation in January this year.
The sterile services unit has been created using space made redundant by previous theatre upgrades. It will provide combined decontamination and sterilisation services for the Trust, which provides hospital services and more than 550 beds to a 400,000 population across East Berkshire and South Buckinghamshire. David Kingsbury, business development director for Welconstruct’s London office, said: ‘The new unit is responsible for cleaning and sterilising all the re-usable instruments and equipment used in the operating departments, wards, clinics and departments of the Trust’s two main sites.
‘Every item will be washed, checked, packed and sterilised. A labelling system will provide the date of sterilisation and autoclave and cycle numbers. All the sterilised items will then be distributed back to the correct location ready for use. In total, the Wexham Park facility will deal with approximately 96,000 DIN baskets each year.’
Welconstruct has provided utilities such as purified water, gas and medical air at Wexham Park, as well as various M&E services.
Previous Welconstruct projects include schemes for the Wolverhampton NHS Trust and the Homerton NHS Trust in London, and a £1.5m sterile services unit at the NHS Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford. The most recent project is a £3.5m facility for Synergy Healthcare at the company’s first multi-million pound healthcare decontamination supercentre in Manchester. Here a former industrial shed has been transformed into an 18,000sq ft sterile services supercentre that will process millions of instruments each year for five hospitals.