Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital is the National Centre of Excellence and tertiary referral centre for nearly all paediatric services in Ireland, treating children from both sides of the border.
The new Hybrid Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital combines a cardiac catheterisation laboratory with an operating theatre. This arrangement removes a significant amount of risk from emergency events by enabling an instant switch from a percutaneous procedure to surgery. It accommodates not only routine cardiac catheterisation interventions, but also combined catheter-based interventions and open surgery, all under a single anaesthetic.
The new Laboratory is located next to interventional suites and operating theatres to keep logistics simple and to allow both clinical and support resources to be shared. Its constituent parts are those of a standard operating theatre, including an anaesthetic room, scrub room, preparation room, and clean and dirty utility rooms, with additional space for the X-ray equipment and its control room, sterile store, equipment store and general store. During the contract, an Orthopaedic Theatre Suite was added to the brief and this was integrated in the scheme with minimal loss of time.
The building forms a simple rectangle in plan. Its main floor coincides with the existing operating theatres and is connected to them by a glazed link bridge. External walls are finished in a light grey render with a base of blue engineering bricks. Its aluminium window frames and sills are coloured mid-grey. The top floor of the building is set back and clad in panels that are painted the same colour as the window frames. The palette of materials employed on the development reflects those used on the operating theatre block, also designed by Cullen Payne Architects.
