AN ARCHITECT behind a flagship children's hospital that has been delayed by six months has claimed construction was rushed despite repeated warnings that designs were "seriously flawed".
Robert Menzies said staff, patients and taxpayers will end up with a building that is "not as good as it good be" because the pressure to meet deadlines led managers in charge of the £150 million Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh to ignore potential problems.
He said columns blocking the middle of rooms, lack of daylight to bedrooms and difficulties of trying to use the central atrium as a dual purpose outpatients' waiting room and exhibition space with patients' cinema were among the flaws.
In a letter to the Herald, Mr Menzies - an experienced healthcare architect who is now retired - said clinicians' complaints that the layout would be "totally useless" and "completely unacceptable" were ignored.
Mr Menzies, who was also involved in the design of the new Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, was working for BMJ Architects in Glasgow when the firm was hired by NHS Lothian, jointly with Nightingale Associates, to draw up an "exemplar design" for the new Edinburgh children's hospital.
The exemplar is a template design which is used as a guide layout by architects subsequently bidding for a construction contract.
However, Mr Menzies said the exemplar process was complicated by numerous redesigns as the health board switched from requesting only a children's hospital to incorporating an extension of the existing adult neurological department into the site. It then dropped the neurological unit before re-incorporating it again when the project went from being publicly-funded to a PFI scheme.
Speaking to the Herald, Mr Menzies said he became increasingly concerned that flaws in the exemplar design were not being ironed out because of pressure to keep to schedule.
He said: "There was pressure to get this up and running. That's the problem with the exemplar design system is that you're rushing to meet a deadline and you don't have time to work out things and anticipation is that the bidders will work out these things [during the competition process]."
However, Mr Menzies - who went on to compete unsuccessfully for the construction contract in a team comprising BMJ, BEP, BAM and Balfour Beattie - said the NHS project managers subsequently warned bidders they would lose points for diverging from the exemplar layout.
Mr Menzies' team, guided by him, nonetheless drew up an alternative set of plans to "remedy the issues" of the exemplar design, but were scored lowest.
Mr Menzies said he believes they lost out because it was "quicker and easier" for the health board to stick to the original layout.
It comes after NHS Lothian confirmed that the Sick Kids Hospital will now open six months late, in spring 2018, due to "unavoidable technical construction problems", poor weather and financial problems affecting two of the contractors.
A spokeswoman for the health board said that the "technical construction problems" were unrelated to the building's design.
Susan Goldsmith, acting chief executive of NHS Lothian, said the main cause of delays was one subcontractor entering administration and a second going into liquidation.
She said: "The competitive bid process was extremely robust and our project and clinical teams worked with a number of firms to make sure we selected the correct partners to build this world-class facility.
Ms Goldsmith added that the design had "fully evolved since the initial reference stage" and "will meet current and future needs".
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