"People focussing exclusively on the seismic safety of Grey Base Hospital seem to have missed the point as to why the DHB is seeking to upgrade or replace the facility", said Wayne Champion, General Manager of Corporate Services at the West Coast DHB.
The main reason is not directly related to the buildings seismic issues but instead relates to the health services provided from the building and the fact that they are not optimally configured in terms of clinical safety or efficiency.
Critical after hours services (those where there is a likelihood of a patient requiring resuscitation for example) are spread across the hospital site with CCU, Paediatrics and Accident and Emergency Services effectively in three different corners of the hospital, making it both inefficient in terms of its staffing costs and potentially unsafe in terms of the ability for specialist resuscitation staff to back one-another up in an unexpected event..
Medical and Surgical services are located on different floors, making it difficult to adjust bed numbers or staff numbers between these services in the case of a crisis or as a response to changing patient demand. These services cannot easily be changed in order to be co-located or integrated with one-another, partly because most of the ward areas of the hospital are on the second or third storey, dramatically increasing the cost of extending or changing them so that they are interconnected, and partly due to the seismic issue, which requires that the building be substantially strengthened or changed at the time that the DHB seeks a building consent in order to rectify the issue detailed above.
In 2004, Government updated the Building Act, dramatically changing the structural requirements for buildings that serve a post disaster function (including medical facilities). These changes require that parts of a hospital that serve a specific post disaster function be designed in a way that would allow them to remain functional after a 1 in 2500 year earthquake.
As it happens, engineering techniques have changed in the 40 years since Greymouth Hospital was designed, mainly to reflect lessons learned from major earthquakes in California and Japan. The emphasis is on a flexible (rather than rigid) design that can move with an earthquake.
Whether or not the existing Greymouth hospital building is able to withstand a major earthquake is something we simply will not know unless one occurs. There is no doubt that a lot of thought went into its structural design and I too would be surprised if the majority of it didn't survive a major quake, however this sentiment doesn't change the fact that it doesn't comply with current building act requirements and doesn't meet current seismic engineering standards.
Moving past the seismic issue, there are a number of other design issues that we are seeking to remedy when planning a new facility.
The hospital has a flat roof with internally guttering, not an ideal design for an area that occasionally experiences heavy rainfall. The Butynol surface on the roof leaks and the flat concrete surface under then make it near impossible to find the actual source of the leaks. Other parts of the building (Parfitt Ward, for example) suffer from leaky building syndrome.
Windows were placed as in-fills in gaps in pre-cast concrete walls. Many of the windows within the building leak as a direct result of this construction technique.
Many of the service ducts through the building contain electrical and IT services, alongside water reticulation, steam reticulation and internal guttering, a situation that dramatically increases the impact of what might otherwise be a minor water or steam leak.
There is only one water supply into the site, an old (so potentially brittle) asbestos pipe that runs under the railway line. There is also only one electricity supply, though we have mitigated the direct risk of this issue by installing a new emergency generator.
Electrical services (in particular) are due for a major upgrade mainly as a result of an electrical fire that occurred in one of the main switch boards in the early 1990's.
Water and steam services are also aging.
Parts of the facility still contain encapsulated asbestos.
Each of these individual issues could potentially cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to address and so it is only reasonable to take a step back and consider the wider picture of whether or not a 40 year old facility design still ideally meets the needs of the West Coast population.
We are still going through a process of analysing health needs and investigating different configuration options and in fact haven't yet ruled out the possibility of re-enforcing and reconfiguring the current facility.
For more information please contact
Bryan Jamieson
Community Liaison Officer
West Coast DHB
PO Box 387
Greymouth 7840
Phone (DDI): (03) 769-7665
Mobile: 027 245-9595
Email: