The acute hospital serves Peterborough and north Cambridgeshire. The new build development replaced both the Peterborough District Hospital and Edith Cavell Hospital.
Alongside the 22 acute theatres and 612 in-patient beds, the hospital provides a full range of specialist departments and services. These include an emergency care centre, a high-tech diagnostics unit, a women’s and children’s unit, renal dialysis unit and a multi-disciplinary training centre.
The hospital also has a bed mental health unit which comprises adult acute, psychiatric intensive care and older peoples units.
The hospital development sits around centralised dining, fitness and staff facilities and garden areas.

Sandy Brown was commissioned to provide the acoustic design for the new hospital. There were a number of acoustic considerations, which included:

• compliance with Health Technical Memoranda performance requirements
• environmental impact including noise from road helicopter and construction activities
• sound insulation of internal walls and floors
• reverberation control and acoustic quality
• noise from building services, to internal area and externally to neighbours and the control of crosstalk via common services.

Identifying problematic relationships between noisy rooms and those that needed a quieter environment during the planning stages was central to the successful functioning of the development. Doing this allowed us to minimise the sound insulation performance of separating floors walls and doors by introducing buffer zones. These included en-suite bathrooms in noisier areas to reduce sound transmission from one room to another.