In response to the health emergency caused by Covid-19, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital invested in the urgent expansion of its existing intensive care provision. By adding 500 additional intensive care unit (ICU) beds, the hospital increased capacity by 16%. As patient numbers rose, delivering this additional capacity quickly was essential but, equally, it was important to ensure commercial viability and to ultimately ensure the scheme delivered value for money. To do this, our team worked tirelessly to meet extremely tight deadlines to provide the client and project team with the commercial information at the right time to ensure informed decisions could be made.

As speed was vital, Enza Construction was appointed on turnkey by Gauteng Department of Infrastructure Development. This procurement route was selected by Client to deliver cost effective facility at a reduce time frame without compromising safety and compliance to national building standards, in the aid to combat the COVID-19 virus pandemic. The new hospital construction area is in access of 26 000m2, the construction works completion excluding equipment will be in line with Phase 3 completion date thereafter the Department of Health will take over to do their fit-outs. Alternative building technologies were used on this project which enabled the fast-tracked construction resulting in the shorter construction period compared to the conventional method of construction, these alternative building technologies included 3 SANS compliant technologies available within the South African market, off site manufacturing was also used to assist the programme.

Throughout the expansion works, the rest of the hospital remained operational. The suitable site was selected for proposed cluster hospital facility with least impact on the environment and existing facilities.