Bam Barnstaple hospital contract: design and delivery notes for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Bam UK & Ireland has secured an £18.6m contract to build 120 ensuite bedrooms and four family apartments for clinical staff and students at North Devon District Hospital in Barnstaple, funded from the national New Hospital Programme’s £22.7m allocation. The on-site blocks will use shared kitchen, living and dining spaces and are intended to cut long staff commutes and mitigate local housing shortages that hinder recruitment. As the first phase of the Our Future Hospital redevelopment, the scheme precedes new operating theatres, ICU capacity, diagnostics and women’s and children’s facilities.
Technical Brief
- Contract value is £18.6m against a £22.7m New Hospital Programme funding allocation.
- Scope is limited to residential blocks; clinical redevelopment (theatres, ICU, diagnostics) follows in later phases.
- Accommodation is being delivered directly on the North Devon District Hospital estate, minimising staff travel between sites.
- Layout combines ensuite bedrooms with shared kitchen, living and dining spaces to optimise floorplate efficiency.
- Four self-contained family apartments are included, indicating mixed unit typologies and varied M&E load profiles.
- Bam is appointed as single contractor, drawing on prior complex healthcare construction and live-hospital interface experience.
- Scheme is procured through the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s Our Future Hospital programme structure.
- For similar NHS estates, on-site residential phases are emerging as early-enabling works ahead of major clinical builds.
Our Take
Within our 690-piece Infrastructure set, Bam UK & Ireland appears frequently on NHS and education work, suggesting the Trust is buying into a contractor with established healthcare design, infection-control and live-hospital phasing experience rather than a generalist regional builder.
The £22.7m New Hospital Programme backing at North Devon District Hospital signals that Barnstaple is one of the smaller, early enabling schemes in the national pipeline, which contractors often use to position for larger acute-care blocks and diagnostics hubs that follow on the same campus.
Delivering 120 ensuite bedrooms plus family apartments on a constrained hospital site in Barnstaple will test Bam’s offsite and modular capability; in our database, similar UK health-campus accommodation jobs have leaned on prefabricated bathroom pods and panelised façades to cut disruption and programme risk.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
