McLaren Construction has won the £28 million contract to build the St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub in Hornchurch, bringing together primary care, mental health, and prevention services, along with cancer care and dialysis, in purpose-built premises.
Scheduled for completion in the first half of 2024, the hub has been developed by partners across north-east London to provide a base for a team of health and care professionals delivering a new model of integrated care, enabling patients to speak to a range of professionals in a single visit. It will serve the boroughs of Havering, Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham, with a bigger focus on prevention, early intervention, and wellbeing, ‘to support people to live well for longer, and reduce the number of hospital visits and admissions’.
Instrumental were local GPs working with NHS partners from North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT), NHS North East London, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT), and Barts Health. The hub will also provide space for a local voluntary, community, and support groups working to improve local residents’ health and wellbeing, and includes a community café, multi-purpose education and meeting spaces, and a sensory, ‘dementia-friendly’, communal garden.
McLaren will use a ‘hybrid’ of traditional and Modern Methods of Construction for the three-storey building. Divisional director, and head of Healthcare, Richard Eager, said: “This handsome building will be a flagship for the delivery of a truly integrated model of care. We have been able to help this expert partnership deliver their ambitious plans in an affordable way, despite rising construction costs, through the right mix of modern technology and traditional construction methods. With recent instructions from both the NHS and private sector healthcare providers, McLaren is taking an active part in the transformation of primary care services in England.”
Groundworks have begun on the site, off Suttons Lane. Contractors have undertaken clearance works including site surveys and asbestos removal, parts of the old St George’s Hospital building have been demolished, and the grounds levelled to prepare the site for the new centre.