HEALTHCARE
WHAT GOES INTO THE CONSTRUCTION OF A REVOLUTIONARY HEALTHCARE EDUCATION FACILITY? Bolton College of Medical Sciences (BCMS) is a 6500m2, £40m, purpose-built vocational skills and education training centre, which is being built on the grounds of the Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust site. The BCMS project will radically reinvent how nurses and other clinical care professionals are trained in the UK. It represents a unique and collaborative partnership between the University of Bolton, Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, Bolton College and Bolton Council. Here, John Murphy, Partner at Box Clever Consulting, and Mark O’Reilly, Managing Director at Just Ask Scarlett and Project Director at Bolton College of Medical Sciences, discuss more about the project. 2022, the project secured £20m of I nLevelling Up funding. Thanks to the financial contributions of all delivery partners, BCMS is set to be open for its first cohort of students by September 2024. The BCMS building design partners, led by Associated Architects and Box Clever Consulting, worked with Willmott Dixon and Just Ask Scarlett, a specialist consultancy in educational capital projects, to ensure that the design was curriculum led. The approach goes beyond the usual broad-brush methods of many educational and public sector capital projects, in its analysis of the many nuanced curriculum and pedagogical requirements. Once complete, the BCMS building will not only provide the specific teaching and learning environments required for its curriculum, but it will have inbuilt flexibility, allowing for teaching and learning environments to be easily remodelled and adaptable for the range and provision of courses on offer. The curriculum design and analysis went line by line through future course provision, at both a modular and lesson-by-lesson basis, mapping out the physical and technological requirements of a specialist teaching college. This consultation was undertaken with key stakeholders from each of the prospective building ‘users’ – the University of Bolton, the Royal Bolton
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Hospital Foundation Trust and Bolton College, each of which will use BCMS to deliver vocational skills training to their own learner cohorts. The resulting data was aggregated and highlighted the needs for specific types of teaching and its learning floorspace. For instance, BCMS comprises simulation suites, flexi-classrooms, VR provision, IT suites and independent learning spaces, each of which requires a detailed design brief for the design team to work within. Typically, understanding the granular detail of the curriculum as part of the briefing process is highly unusual, but BCMS was a rare exception. By knowing exactly which courses would be run there, it allowed the design team to test both the type and size of space required in a much more informed way. As a result, we have been able to achieve greater levels of utilisation than usual in a building with this mix of users.
More considered procurement One of the most common criticisms from contractors is that building procurement is too price driven, with not enough emphasis on quality, service and innovation. Despite some clients arguing otherwise, singlestage competitive tendering can have a strong bias towards price. As a result, contractors have to find ways to reduce costs, leading to a poorer end product.
This project sought to take a more considered approach. We wanted contractors to be judged on the wider service and value they could offer, not just their ability to save pennies on the pound. That meant convincing prospective tenderers that we intended to do things differently. To reduce bureaucracy, we utilised an existing framework agreement from Procure Partnerships. We did some early market warm up to inform contractors about the project and show what we were doing differently in respect of collaboration delivery approach. This included a site visit before we had even commenced procurement. We proposed a two-stage, twocontractor procurement route over a 10-week tender period. This offered a 50% ‘win rate’ for the final two contractors, but maintained an element of competition between the two. We declared our full build budget very early on. This allowed contractors to gauge if they thought the budget was sufficient (they agreed it was) and demonstrated an openness and transparency from the outset. A number of mid-tender meetings were organised, with both contractors and the design team, to ensure they fully understood the scope of the project that they were tendering for. We wanted to avoid any mistakes in pricing or scope that could jeopardise the project further down the road.