Doctors given keys to 'flatpack' hospital (From Watford Observer)

Doctors given keys to 'flatpack' hospital

8:40am Tuesday 2nd September 2008

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The keys to Watford’s brand new 120-bed hospital, where the town’s most poorly patients will in future be treated, were yesterday officially handed over to the doctors who will run it.

When the new three storey Acute Admissions Unit (AAU) opens in March it will treat every patient requiring emergency care in west Hertfordshire.

Thomas Hanahoe, chair of West Herts Hospitals Trust, said the handover was “a significant step” for the trust.

He said: “We first identified in 2006 that we wanted to differentiate our services by location. “We determined that the elective surgery, the knees, the hips the things people want to have done, will be carried out at St Albans City Hospital and the emergency surgery was carried out at Watford.

“The completion of the AAU is a major landmark within that plan.”

Dubbed the “flatpack hospital”, the revolutionary new building’s 145 separate steel framed modules were manufactured in York and transported 200 miles to Watford where, over the past five months, they were welded together.

After each self-contained unit was delivered to Vicarage Road on articulated lorries, the AAU, which will eventually cater for 300,000 people in Hemel Hempstead, St Albans and Watford, was put together in just three weeks.

It was due to open at the end of October, however, the builders encountered unforeseen problems with cabling.

It is now due to open on March 11 and once it is functioning will act as the “front door” off the hospital.

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