Barton Knight Contracting was approached by St Peter’s Hospital in late September 2020 to provide electrical works for a new 12-bed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) designed specifically for COVID-19 patients – Chestnut Ward. The design and installation of a standalone air conditioning unit was also required. The unit had to filter out air potentially contaminated by the virus, and operate separately to the existing air conditioning system.
Work took place during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, so the hospital needed a contractor that had safe, established sanitation and social distancing practices in place, but had the experience to deliver the project in eight weeks.
Barton Knight was able to deliver on all counts. As the building was already used to house COVID-19 patients, the area had to be deep-cleaned with sanitiser ‘bombs’ to ensure electrical engineers did not contract the virus. Full PPE was used by engineers, and the work progressed with minimum disruption
to staff and patients.
As St Peter’s Hospital does not have a back-up generator farm, an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) had to be fitted to ensure continuous support for at least 3 hours in the event of a power cut or dip in supply. The UPS was fed into the wards via bedhead trunking which would allow the critical care machinery to operate through a power failure. Normally the UPS would only operate for a few minutes (providing power if it senses a failure of 0.02 seconds, classified as ‘unacceptable downtime’) before a back-up generator kicks in.
However, once the UPS unit was installed there was no room for the existing generator. Chestnut Ward is a modular building, and part of the ward was always designed to house intensive care units, but there wasn’t space for the new beds and the UPS unit. Barton Knight therefore installed a generator in the car park as a temporary solution.
The project was delivered on time and to budget. Barton Knight has since been contracted for further projects at St Peter’s Hospital.
