New Dunedin Hospital

This project demonstrates WSP’s ability to provide critical engineering design for highly complex healthcare projects.

The Inpatient and Outpatient buildings, which will form the New Dunedin Hospital, will cover an entire city block. Working closely with the Architect and Building Services Consultant, the WSP team is developing solutions for seismic restraint on a scale and complexity that has not been implemented in New Zealand before.

The design team are working in a fully BIM federated environment, but the requirement is for high levels of collaboration and empathy in order to make this project a success. Standardised zones for plant and services are seeking to simplify the solution as much as possible using the old phrase ‘if it is easy to draw, it will be easy to build’.

Good communication with the local authority (helped by WSP having a local office in Dunedin and strong relationships), have been important for the Civil Engineering team, ensuring the public sewer and stormwater systems are capable of taking the demand from the new developments. Clever use of the soft landscaping is making this possible, as well as inground storage solutions. The development also requires 72-hour self-sufficiency in the event of an earthquake calling for water storage tanks to be constructed on site.

This project is still in the design phase, but highlights WSP’s ability to provide solutions to highly complex problems. The services we are delivering here are identical to those on Taranaki Cancer Centre, plus we are using our local office to provide construction monitoring services, showing the model is not new.