Artelia Healthcare has delivered a new Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) unit at Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) in Harlow. The facility enables many patients coming into the Emergency Department to be seen and assessed by specialist clinicians sooner, reducing the likelihood of them requiring an overnight stay in hospital. This is the second SDEC delivered by Artelia Healthcare this year, with Epsom Hospital’s unit opened in January.

The team handed over the completely clinically fitted-out PAH SDEC facility last week and it is already fully operational and making a difference to patient treatment.

In January, the first phase of the project, PAH’s new Adult Assessment went live, with the SDEC phase following rapidly afterwards. The programme was delivered at pace with an ambitious four-month construction programme in a live hospital, under severe pressure from the Covid pandemic.

It is only through fostering a true partnership approach between the amazing hospital teams, contractor and our site-based PMs that we were able to step up to the challenge of running the site 24/7 to deliver the critical capacity needed at this time. Our project managers’ understanding of the hospital’s operational demands, ability to communicate effectively with clinicians and their passion for the challenges of delivering complex projects in live hospital environments was key.

We look forward to continuing to support future developments at PAH.