Willmott Dixon is bringing its pre-design concepts to the healthcare market following the huge success of Sunesis and CODE which have secured the company over £200m in orders in the last five years.

The company has teamed up with architect Penoyre & Prasad to develop an integrated health hub called Cura which provides NHS Trusts and councils with a new generation of pre-designed community healthcare facilities to drive cost efficiency and encourage better collaboration of health and social care services under one roof.

Cura is a repeatable solution to the challenge of creating new, fit-for-purpose buildings that are future proof for the needs of local healthcare. It is believed to be the first such concept available for healthcare customers.

Cura adopts the latest construction methods by using a pre-cast concrete frame structure built off-site for added speed of delivery, with a minimal degree of fixed internal structure. It offers standard sized multi-use rooms designed as clusters that enable NHS Trusts to bespoke their hub to suit individual clinical departmental requirements, such as therapies, dental, general practices, diagnostics and mental health.

Just like Sunesis and CODE, Cura has been designed to give healthcare customers certainty of cost, time and quality. It can be adapted into a combination of sizes, starting from 1,500m2 and rising to 5,000m2.

Cura brings together all of Wilmott Dixon’s heath sector expertise and knowledge and is already attracting expressions of interest from NHS Trusts and councils across the country. Construction timescales are quick, taking approximately 40 weeks depending on the size of the chosen hub.

The CODE system of pre-designed custody suites is being used by police forces like in Humberside

Willmott Dixon’s Cura lead, Anastasia Chrysafi:

“Our in-house health specialists have invested heavily in taking learning from our pre-design products developed for the education, leisure and custodial sectors to bring these advantages to healthcare. Cura will give NHS Trusts, councils and their partners the benefit of quicker delivery for much needed facilities with the added bonus of cost, programme and quality certainty, which is a key issue with the budget restraints in place.”

“Importantly, we configure the internal layout to suit local needs, with the pre-cast element also providing high levels of thermal mass, which moderates the internal temperature and makes the building as energy-efficient as possible.”

Cura puts better patient outcomes at the forefront of the concept, with the Willmott Dixon team behind it guided by NHS thinking on future models that integrate care in the community with bringing services closer to people’s homes to relieve pressure on hospitals.

The NHS is also under pressure to regenerate and renew much of its estate at a time when budgets are stretched, leaving many capital building projects beyond many trusts. A 2017 report by NHS Digital found that the money needed to address the “high-risk” building and maintenance backlog caused by the NHS’s ageing estate had almost doubled, from £458m in 2014-15 to £947m in 2016.

Its launch comes two years after Willmott Dixon brought to market its range of pre-designed custodial facilities called CODE. These have been adopted by police forces such as Humberside Police, which is using CODE for its next generation custodial facility in Grimsby.

Both Cura and CODE followed the success of the Sunesis school concept developed with Scape Group that has seen over 45 primary schools built providing over 18,000 new places for a fixed cost and time scale.

For more information visit our NEW website www.curahealth.co.uk