About Clinical Visions

Most construction problems in a clinical building are not construction problems. They are interface problems.

A general contractor can build a good room. What tends to go wrong in a practice is the space between trades and between disciplines: the shielding that gets cut through by a socket, the pressure regime that fails because a ceiling void was left open, the decontamination bench that ends up in the wrong order because the drainage was on the other wall, the theatre pendant with no steelwork above it. Every one of those is somebody's responsibility and none of them is clearly anybody's.

Being a specialist means those interfaces sit inside one contract instead of between several. It also means the compliance evidence is produced by the people who did the work rather than assembled afterwards from other people's records. That is not a wider range of building work than a general contractor offers. It is a narrower one, done with the regulatory requirement designed in from the survey rather than discovered at commissioning.

Veterinary, dental, medical and laboratory. They are more alike than they look, and the differences are the interesting part.

All four are regulated buildings where a room has to satisfy an external requirement before it can be used, where the client usually cannot close, and where the handover evidence matters as much as the finish. The construction skills transfer almost completely. What does not transfer is the regulatory knowledge, and that is where a contractor who works in one sector gets caught out in another. IR(ME)R applies to the medical exposure of patients and never to veterinary practice. RCVS premises registration is mandatory wherever veterinary medicines are held and is a separate obligation from the voluntary Practice Standards Scheme. A dental practice sits under CQC registration and is inspected against HTM 01-05. Getting one of those wrong on a building is expensive.

So the four sectors sit under one company deliberately rather than opportunistically. The same construction discipline runs through all of them, worked against four different sets of requirements: veterinary, dental, medical and laboratory.

A clinical room is not finished when it looks finished. It is finished when it can be shown to work.

On a clinical job the handover pack is part of the deliverable rather than paperwork that trails after it. Commissioning results for the ventilation. Electrical test certificates. Water and gas certification where those services were touched. F-Gas records for any refrigerant system we installed. Operating and maintenance information for the plant, and as-built information showing where the services actually run rather than where they were drawn. Where a room has to satisfy an external requirement before it can be used, the evidence that it does is assembled as the work proceeds rather than reconstructed at the end from other people's paperwork.

This matters because the people who inspect a practice do not inspect the finish. A CQC inspector, an RCVS assessor or a radiation protection adviser asks to see records, and records carry more weight when they were produced by the party that did the work, at the time it was done.

It matters again on the next job. A practice that holds as-built information for its own building can price the next phase properly, and can tell whoever does that work where the shielding stops and which wall the drainage runs down. A practice without it pays for the survey twice.

If you want to test any of this before you shortlist anybody, ask us a specific technical question about your own building. What comes back will tell you a good deal about whether we are the right contractor for it.