Underfloor heating and bedheads in bedrooms are the latest facilities being installed at the UK’s first NHS National Rehabilitation Centre, which will begin receiving patients later this year.
The 70-bed purpose-built rehabilitation centre near Loughborough, which will be staffed and run by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, aims to transform rehabilitation in the UK. The latest progress photos reveal the bespoke wooden bedheads being installed in patient and visitor bedrooms, and underfloor heating being fitted throughout the ground floor – including the main gym. Plastering throughout the building has also been completed, and some bedrooms have been painted with primer. Meanwhile, on the building’s exterior the black cladding is complete, and the framework installed to hold the final rainscreen cladding which will give the NRC its finished appearance.
The £105 million NRC development, part of the New Hospital Programme, will create a specialist facility combining NHS care with research and innovation from the Trust’s two academic partners – the University of Nottingham and Loughborough University. The Stanford Hall Rehabilitation Estate near Loughborough, already home to the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre which opened in 2018, was carefully selected as the site for the NRC to bring together these two centres of excellence and drive rehabilitation standards both nationally and internationally.
Construction of the new facility, which is intended to be an extremely energy-efficient building in support of the NHS ambition to be Carbon Net Zero by 2040, is being undertaken by IHP, a joint venture between VINCI Building and Sir Robert McAlpine. The design harnesses Modern Methods of Construction. The Trust and NRC project team said: “Work continues to integrate a smart hospital design to make the NRC as digitally advanced as possible, with the capability to incorporate additional cutting-edge technology in the future.”