Practical completion reached on steel-framed Manchester health unit

A major milestone on the new state-of-the-art £105M adult mental health inpatient unit, North View in Manchester, has been reached with practical completion having been achieved and the building formally handed over to the Trust.

The facility, built by main contractors IHP, a joint venture between VINCI Building and Sir Robert McAlpine, replaces Park House on the North Manchester General Hospital site.

It is expected to open its doors to patients next month (November), providing 150 bedrooms over nine single-sex wards, and includes a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), six Adults of Working Age wards, one Older Adults ward and a rehabilitation ward.

Trust Project Director for North View, Marc Reed, said: “We are absolutely delighted to have reached this important landmark in this exciting and transformative project. This is the culmination of significant investment and several years of hard work by various stakeholders and partners to reach this point.

“We are really looking forward to the building becoming fully operational, which will create new therapeutic environments to support recovery for our service users, and provide optimum conditions for our staff to deliver the highest quality of care.”

Garry Bowker, Regional Managing Director for VINCI Building, said: “This project helped us create significant employment, training and education opportunities, while enabling us to invest in an on-site community skills centre to support local 16–24 year-olds furthest away from the labour market. This has helped to close the construction skills gap in North Manchester.”

Leach Structural Steelwork fabricated, supplied and erected 1,125t of steelwork for the project.