Waiting area at Houghton Primary Care Centre

Yesterday I had the honour of being part of the team to receive the award from the BRE for the, now confirmed, Outstanding award under BREEAM Healthcare for Houghton Primary Care Centre. The Award was made to Steve Naylor from Sunderland PCT at the IHEEM conference in Manchester.
Being the first healthcare building in England to be awarded such an exemplary award it was with extreme pride that I was invited to speak briefly about the meaning of the award for P+HS. Pride, but also guilt, as I’m very aware that all of the hard work was done over two and a half years by Adrian Evans, Eamon Shutt and the entire technical team. Congratulations to you all, this is a great achievement for both you and the practice.

Developed for Sunderland Teaching Primary Care Trust as part of their
strategy to improve facilities to support healthy communities, Houghton is an exemplar in sustainable design and provides high quality and accessible health, social care, sports and leisure facilities from one integrated site.

P+HS has worked closely with the PCT for over eight years and is responsible for the architectural design of several innovative and sustainable primary health care facilities across the North East. The client’s commitment and the very early introduction of a BREEAM Assessor added clear focus to the Houghton project in terms of sustainability targets and the development was also able to benefit from a highly experienced project team and lessons learned on earlier schemes.

Sustainable elements include thermal wall facilitating innovative low energy natural ventilation strategy, ground source heat pumps, water attenuation, wind turbine, underfloor heating, rain water reclamation, green roof, solar thermal panels and photovoltaic panels.

The team responsible for the successful delivery of Houghton le Spring Primary Care Centre are:

Client: Sunderland Teaching Primary Care Trust
Architect: P+HS Architects
Contractor: Willmott Dixon
Natural Ventilation Engineers: Breathing Buildings
Structural Engineer: Cundall
M&E Engineers: Mott MacDonald
BREEAM Assessor: WD Re-Thinking

Selected as a case study by BRE, you can read more about this project here