Tilbury Douglas Dorset £100m ED: helipad and layout notes for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Tilbury Douglas has topped out Dorset County Hospital’s £100m New Hospital Programme-funded emergency department and critical care building with installation of a £2m aluminium rooftop helipad by Bayards, the county’s only hospital rooftop landing facility. The prefabricated helideck, imported from the Netherlands, has an area of about 284 sq ft and a load capacity of 8,600kg, enabling direct air ambulance access to the new two-storey clinical block. The scheme expands critical care from 11 to 16 beds, adds paediatric and mental health-specific spaces, and links to the main hospital via a new corridor.
Technical Brief
- £100m New Hospital Programme funding underpins the two-storey emergency and critical care block.
- Critical Care Unit capacity rises from 11 to 16 beds, with shell provision for future expansion.
- Paediatric-specific clinical space is integrated within the expanded Critical Care Unit layout.
- A dedicated children and young people’s zone is planned within the new Emergency Department footprint.
- Mental health assessment and treatment areas are designed as discrete spaces within the emergency care pathway.
- A new enclosed link corridor connects the block to the existing main hospital for direct patient transfer.
- Space released in the existing estate is earmarked for same day emergency care reconfiguration.
- Dorset County Hospital Charity is targeting £2.5m for add-ons such as overnight relative and staff accommodation.
Our Take
Tilbury Douglas has featured repeatedly in our recent Infrastructure coverage, with leadership changes and the Paragon-to-Tilbury Douglas Fit Out rebrand signalling a deliberate push to present as a full-lifecycle delivery partner for NHS-scale projects such as Dorset County Hospital’s emergency and critical care build.
The rooftop helideck at Dorset County Hospital, supplied by Bayards and largely funded through the HELP Appeal and local charity targets, underlines how UK hospital trauma infrastructure often depends on blended public–charitable capital rather than pure New Hospital Programme funding, a pattern seen across several of the 918 Infrastructure stories in our database.
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.
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