Monitoring and Dust Control at Crawley Hospital

Project Overview

Crawley Hospital required major redevelopment of its Urgent Care Centre to provide an enlarged Clinical Assessment Unit, improved Paediatrics treatment rooms and a new open plan waiting area. The scheme also included the construction of a 26 bed sub-acute ward for patients no longer in need of acute care at other hospitals.

The surrounding parts of the hospital needed to function as normal, so it was vital that dust was not allowed to escape from the areas under construction. Effective control of the dust was therefore required, as well as the means to check that it was being kept safely away from staff and patients.

Nowhere is the control of dust more crucial than in a hospital. Many patients will have conditions that are seriously aggravated by dust, and all patients, staff and visitors need to be protected as far as possible from airborne contaminants. Before any work could commence, it was clear that dust would need to be both controlled and monitored.

Challenge

It was essential that hospital services could continue operating normally during the building works. To protect patients, their visitors, and the staff, dust generated by the works needed to be kept away from working areas of the hospital.

Solution

RVT was called upon for specialist advice and conducted a site survey. To control the dust, RVT’s Mini DustMaster kits were deployed. These kits capture and filter the dust created and also maintain a negative pressure in the work area, ensuring against any migration of dust and therefore fully protecting the other sensitive areas of the hospital.

The works that required dust control were only able to be carried out at certain times each day so that the speed of setting up and taking down the dust extraction system including barriers was key to making the project a success.

To monitor the effectiveness of the dust control a dust monitoring system was installed, starting one week prior to the commencement of works to provide a base line reading of the air quality levels. Stringent parameters were set to provide alerts if certain levels were reached. The monitors were configured to give the site-team access to real-time data, allowing air quality levels to be checked at any time. This, combined with the availability of downloadable reports directly from the monitor, meant the site-team had full access to the information.

"The extract system does exactly what it’s meant to do.” - Mark Bryan, Night Site Manager, Morgan Sindall Construction & Infrastructure