The turnkey solution it provided brought together design, products, installation, commissioning, and service.
Part of the Government’s New Hospital Programme, and operated by the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, the MMUH is part of the New Hospital Programme, and one of the largest hospitals to open in the UK in the last decade.
BeaconMedaes’s eight-year spell on site saw it progress from design through to delivery of the ‘vast and complex’ MGPS required; the MMUH has 736 beds, half in single en suite rooms, an Emergency Department, a dedicated children’s A&E and assessment unit, separate adult and children wards, a midwife-led birthing unit, and a sickle cell and thalassaemia centre. It also has 11 operating theatres for emergency, major and planned surgery, and two maternity theatres.
BeaconMedaes was brought in to develop the MGPS design in 2016. Building work was delayed due to a change of construction company, but when it resumed the BeaconMedaes team went back to the original plan drawings, which had already been significantly adapted with the Trust and the hospital’s Project team.
The MGPS was developed in line with the Trust Contract Requirements (TCR) for a whole new hospital system. Works were retendered against the TCR with other medical gas installers, and again BeaconMedaes was successful in its tender. The MGPS was further developed with Balfour Beatty to ensure compliance against HTM 02-1: Part A.
In March 2020, a few months after work on the hospital had recommenced, the COVID-19 lockdowns began. Operating under COVID restrictions, the BeaconMedaes installation team, and its sub-contractor workforce from M&M Medical, continued to work alongside Balfour Beatty and other services. On 6 October 2024, MMUH opened to patients.
BeaconMedaes had successfully met a complex brief for the medical gas pipeline that would cover the huge infrastructure of the new hospital, providing all the source equipment (apart from the oxygen tanks) to serve over 700 patient beds, 13 theatres, endoscopy and catheter lab procedure rooms, and the corresponding back-up systems. The plant and systems supplied included:
- Nitrous oxide manifolds.
- Entonox manifolds A and B.
- CO2 manifold.
- Back-up manifolds for medical and surgical air, and oxygen.
- Main medical air plant.
- Surgical air plant.
- Vacuum.
- 12 Simplex anaesthetic gas scavenger pumps for the operating theatres.
- 8 Duplex AGS pumps to serve various areas site-wide.
BeaconMedaes will continue servicing the equipment as part of its planned preventative maintenance (PPM) plan. Its multi-year contract also includes the servicing of the air plant and vacuum plant, and annual rebalancing and set up of the AGS system.