Lyca Healthcare Facility

Lyca Healthcare provide consultation and diagnostic services. An existing building known as Enso House on a business estate in Mill Road Orpington, required a change of use from offices to healthcare. The work required to achieve the change of use included a new entrance, complete refit internally, improvements to the external works and new external plant area.

Heavy new equipment, including MRI and CT scanners, required an assessment of the existing ground floor structure to determine whether any strengthening works were required. The estate was developed in the 1980s and no recorded information of the existing structure was available. At the earliest opportunity, and to ensure cost and programme certainty prior to the contractor being appointed, we undertook a series of cores through the ground floor slab, and ground investigations to determine the parameters for our assessment. Following a detailed calculation review of the floor construction and strata below, we established that the floor was not capable of supporting the new and increased load.

Cover to existing reinforcement encountered was also relatively shallow and would have had an adverse effect on the magnetic field homogeneity needed for the new MRI to perform effectively, and building over would have created problems in levels generating the need for space consuming ramps.

Client:
Lyca Healthcare


Services:
Structural Engineering