Great Western Hospital

Great Western Hospital is a large hospital situated in Swindon, Wiltshire, England, next to junction 15 of the M4 motorway.

The hospital was one of the first to be built under the Private Finance Initiative at a cost of UK£148 m, with Carillion as the lead contractor.

Building
The architect was Whicheloe Macfarlane, who designed the hospital with a concrete frame design. Flat slab concrete floors 30 cm (12 in) deep are supported by a nominal 7.2 m (23.6 ft) square grid of concrete columns. The outside of the building is covered in 7600 m2 (81,800 sq ft) of cream coloured precast concrete cladding panels which each weigh 14 tonnes and span 7 m (23 ft) x 4 m (13 ft). They attempt to replicate the appearance of Wiltshire stone. There are six floors comprising a total of 55,000 m2 of floor space.

Opening
The hospital opened in 2002 to replace the services previously provided at the Princess Margaret Hospital, which had served the town since 1959. It was formally opened by HRH Prince Philip on 28 February 2003.

Facilities
The facilities at the hospital include an accident and emergency department which sees approximately 50,000 patients per year, an acute assessment unit, an eight bedded Intensive Care Unit, and a wide range of wards and clinics, including 400 in-patient beds, serving approximately 300,000 people and with an annual turnover of UK£156 million.

The hospital was one of the first to use the Picture archiving and communication system film-less x-rays, as part of the NHS's National Programme for IT.

Performance
In the ratings produced by the Healthcare Commission for 2005/2006 the trust scored "good" for the quality of services but "weak" for the management of resources.

In 2006 it was announced that the hospital would be axing up to 200 jobs, 99 of which were likely to involve redundancy.