Many nursing homes, retirement homes, medical centres and hospitals are built in urban settings, often on the sites of former petrol stations, industrial units, offices or hotels – or even existing medical facilities (examples can be found here). Quite often the key challenges for site investigations on these projects consists of defining a robust scope of work, within the client’s budget and based on the investigation results, to create an appropriate remediation strategy.

Key to Geo-Environmentals approach is the use of an initial phase 1 Desk Study. Whilst Geo-Environmental utilise desk studies on all our investigations, in urban brown field setting they are especially important as a thorough understanding of the history of a site is important in developing the preliminary conceptual site model (CSM) and risk assessment, in order that the phase 2 intrusive investigations may be appropriately targetted.

Whilst many of the technical skills for healthcare developments are similar to housing developments, there is more emphasis on providing geotechnical data for highly loaded foundations Geo-Environmental has an experienced and highly qualified team of engineers with the skillsets needed to meet these requirements.

Safety of the public, clients staff or patients and our own staff is of paramount importance on these sites and we always ensure that our investigations are fully cordoned off with appropriate security barriers and equipment is not left on site unless it is stowed securely. The methods that Geo-Environmental use to achieve safety are contained in our ISO9001, ISO14001 and ISO18001 quality management systems and are approved by CHAS and Construction Line.