JCA assisted FCBS in winning the commission to develop an estates strategy for this Trust and then work up detailed proposals for the redevelopment of St Mary’s hospital, one of London’s oldest and most celebrated teaching hospitals yet one of the most decrepit.

This project exemplifies the current challenges of working within the NHS.  We were commissioned to produce a coherent masterplan for an inner London trust of four merged hospitals, none of which are fit for purpose, within the wider context of a highly flawed strategy for reconfiguring clinical services in the north west quadrant of London –‘Shaping a Healthier Future.’

This designated St Mary’s as one of five trauma centres in the quadrant, the problem being that only one of them was capable, in estate terms, of satisfactorily fulfilling this role.  Virtually no capital was made available for their improvement, so any redevelopment had to be funded by receipts from disposals or commercial partnerships. 

The Trust did not have a clinical strategy and were experiencing frequent changes in their leadership team.  JCA was asked to fill a vacuum and adopt the role of proxy client so that a working brief and a functional content could be developed to underpin an estates strategy.  Setting aside the lack of funds, the role which SaHF had designated for St Mary’s made clinical sense, unlike their proposals for Hammersmith and Charing Cross.

After stakeholder engagement a detailed design for the St Mary’s project consolidated the clinical campus into three buildings -  2 major new facilities, an Ambulatory Centre, an Acute Core Hub providing approximately 55 000m2 of floor area and the major refurbishment/ reconfiguration of the thirty year old 30 000m2 QEQM facility.  The master plan also identified the disposal of parts of the site for third party development.