The refurbishment of the Chemotherapy Day Unit at James Cook University Hospital has recently been completed. The refurbishment took what was a series of cramped, dark rooms and extended and refurbished the unit to create a much brighter and more open treatment space along with associated clinical and support spaces.

This refurbishment has been running alongside the development of the new Radiotherapy unit which is due for completion in July.

Above are a few pictures from the new Oncology satellite unit which we are involved with at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough. This unit will provide 3 new linear accelerator (LINAC) bunkers and a CT scanner for treatment planning along with consulting spaces and office accomodation.

The LINAC bunkers are (I believe) the first to be constructed in the UK using a pre-cast panel sandwhich system and in our case the void between the concrete panels is filled with blast furnace slag and magnetite. This system has offered time savings over the traditional mass concrete solutions as well as passing responsibility for the structural design and radiation protection firmly into the bunker suppliers, which is a significant relief for the main contractor!

Unfortunately it’s quite a tight site and there’s a hoarding all the way round which makes getting good photos almost impossible but Sara’s almost finished some external and internal visuals which I’ll post in due course and these give a much better idea of what the building will look like when complete.

The project is due to handover in June 2011.

Those of you working in the healthcare sector will no doubt be aware that the acoustic design of healthcare buildings was re-thought with the introduction of HTM 08-01, in particular the method of selecting appropriate acoustic partitions was seriously overhauled. While the changes took the guesswork out of selecting the required laboratory sound insulation value for partitions, the maths involved in working out the requirements gave me a headache and it took a very long time to work out all of the partition requirements for the first project I carried out under this HTM.

As a result I set up a spreadsheet to take the pain out of the calculations and speed the whole process up, and you can now find this sheet on the intranet should you wish to use it, oddly enough, under the title “HTM 08-01 Calculator”. There are some explanatory notes on the first tab.

A word of warning though, the spreadsheet does a lot for you but you still need to have a basic understanding of the HTM and be aware that the HTM recommends that an acoustic consultant be employed to ensure an holistic approach to acoustic design on all projects.