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.

n 2022, the project secured £20m of Levelling 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

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.

Value for money

Achieving best value should always be the goal of design, procurement and construction on capital projects, but this aim can quickly unravel. A disconnect between design and construction often means that buildings are designed to be more complex and expensive than they need to be. We sought to do a number of things to improve value for the project.

We benchmarked key building elements –in both cost and performance – so that the budget would be spent in the areas where it would have the most impact. As a result, the structural frame, external elevations and building services were prioritised. These provided a flexible layout and a building finish in line with a modern and professional vocational skills environment.

During the first-stage and secondstage procurement, we asked contractors to critique the design and demonstrate how they might improve on it. Doing this allowed for a range of voices, opinions and backgrounds to be constantly assessing and re-evaluating our approach, all the while demonstrating the value they could bring to the project.

We constantly challenged over specification and hidden risk as two wellknown areas where unnecessary cost can accrue without anyone noticing it. As an example, over £100,000 was saved by limiting acoustic treatments to those areas where they would be critical.

Managing inflationary pressure

Delivering a publicly-funded building on this scale has not been without its challenges. The impact of inflation on our budget has proved a significant challenge. We’ve been very fortunate to have a client that has some level of budget flexibility – meaning the design has been allowed to flourish and come to life in the way it deserves.

The heavy emphasis on pre-contract design consultation has also meant that design changes have been kept to an absolute minimum, protecting the design and cost assumptions in the model. That said, we have still had to deal with significant inflationary pressure and the project budget has increased by around 15% as a result.

A building to be proud of

The resulting BCMS building, which is now well into its construction phase, will provide exactly the kind of technologyrich, teaching and learning environment demanded by the curriculum, while giving the end user a high-quality, clinical learning experience.

The journey with the client and contactor has, so far, been a fantastic experience. Despite having had to accommodate a number of twists in the road, construction is firmly on track to meet our aim of accommodating the September 2024 intake of students.

BCMS will be an extraordinary vocational training and teaching space, which will set a revolutionary new standard for training nurses and other clinical care professionals in the UK. A lot of hard work has gone into making sure that BCMS optimises outcomes for both learners and regional healthcare in the North West, and that started a long time ago, before pen hit paper on design. We think it’s the way all vocational skills and educational spaces should be built.