Fast Build construction helping meet overwhelming demand for hospital beds
Overwhelming demand for hospital beds and emergency isolation units to help treat Coronavirus patients has seen Howick’s innovative light steel technology put to incredible use by our customers and their clients in different parts of the world.
48-bed intensive care wards in just three weeks in UK
In England’s East Yorkshire, workers at Premier Modular are creating two 48-bed intensive care hospital wards to service the extra capacity requirements of the UK’s National Health Service. As featured recently on Britain’s ITV network, these emergency wards are being delivered in just three weeks, with teams working tirelessly to complete the design and install. Premier Modular are running production for these solutions simultaneously across five factories, enabling them to produce 260sqm of hospital space a day on a single shift.
A spokesperson for Premier Modular commented “We have been around for almost 65 years and in that time we’ve never witnessed anything like this pandemic or the incredible and inspirational response of the NHS and its staff. The healthcare buildings we build during this crisis will be the most important of our history.”
Meanwhile, the US is facing into a daunting task too. Scenarios analysed by the Harvard Global Health Institute are predicting a national deficit of at least 50,000 ICU beds. Howick customer BLOX is using the Design Manufacture Construct (DMC) rapid construction process it pioneered to supply the medical space necessary for 10,000 of these beds.
BLOX’s CEO, Chris Giattina, when interviewed recently commented “...Nurses and doctors are under enormous pressure, and what you’re trying to do is create a place which is safe for them to work but visually controlled so they can see everything at once. That’s what we focused on: How do we make this really a beautiful, elegantly simple, operationally, visually controlled device that is technologically empowered, and can be deployed really fast.”
Simultaneously, BLOX is working with other manufacturers to mobilize available industry capacity to provide even more help.
In closing, Chris went on to some-up the current challenge: “Necessity is the mother of invention, and I think that we’re, as a nation, in the midst of a necessity. I like what I see in terms of the human spirit coming together to try and solve hard problems right now.”
You can find out more about BLOX and their approach to modular construction for healthcare here.
Light steel modular, offsite and fast build construction techniques have seen a step-change in demand growth in recent years as the world looks for better, more efficient ways to build. But with the globe propelled onto a virtual war footing to fight Covid-19, our machines are likely to be put to through the toughest of tests and do their most important work ever in the coming weeks and months.
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April 2020 #Features