Carnarvon Residential Aged Care provides multiple levels of care to its seniors from residency to health care. The redevelopment of this facility was aimed to provide its patients and residents with the required contemporary facilities that includes the provision of new accessible bedrooms, offices and meeting rooms, dining rooms, special care rooms, introduce new palliative care facilities, and the upgrade and provision of all required services and special equipment. To achieve this, the existing residential aged care was demolished in different stages, constructed in different stages, and then integrated with the existing facilities. The construction of this redevelopment was carried out with an existing and operational aged care and health campus.
Rawlinsons, led by Director Niall Mc Aree, provided early cost estimation at both Business Case and PDP stages of the project and provided full cost management throughout construction.
As this project was carried out in a fully functional aged care and health campus site, its complexity was approached with staging and constant coordination among the stakeholders. Furthermore, this development is within a cyclonic region and is being constructed as a haven for the residents; this, of course, has been reflected in its cost. This project also required the coordination of the different services that the hospital and aged care on site cannot afford to disrupt for extensive, if any, period of time. It proved difficult and costly to accommodate these needs and required staging. Due to the additional rooms, facilities and requirements that this construction imposed, the site required substantial infrastructure upgrades in areas of gas (including medical), fire services, water services, sewer services, power and communications. These upgrades expressed the difficulty and cascading effects on interconnected services and structure. In addition to these points, the original construction was more than 50 years old and, as result, hazardous building materials and asbestos were found all over the site. As demolitions and works progressed,the costs of these latent conditions have been proving to be substantial and can only be expected in buildings as old as these. Finally, as this redevelopment was conducted in a health facility during a global pandemic, health and safety concerns and costs accumulated. It has had its implications on the construction methodology, downtime and operational management, all of which had their own cost implications.
This project reached the end of Defects Liability in early 2023.
