Contracting

Health

Nilsen—Leader in health care projects

It’s no accident that Nilsen teams have been used in fulfilling the electrical contracting requirements of health care facilities all across the country for many years. It’s one of our core areas and we’re proud of the reputation we have built for efficiently completing all manner of different projects within this important industry. We understand that hospitals and medical facilities have very specific needs and our people have the expertise and industry experience to work effectively for the best outcomes, no matter what the scope of the job.

Upgrades to working hospitals, in particular, require careful assessment and implementation to ensure that it’s still business as usual while the works take place. Our strategies, developed in consultation with our clients, ensure that operation requirements are met, including critical stand-by power to ensure stringent patient safety needs are always met. Assess, consult and implement with a multi-faceted approach means we do it once, and do it right. That’s our approach and this attitude has seen our success in this area grow with a number of exciting projects underway.

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineering is a complicated business when large projets are involved. Nilsen is one of the small number of non-building construction companies to adopt the Autocad™ technology in its contracting business. It is typical of our innovative approach, and determination to be a consistent leader in our chosen fields of electrical engineering and construction. We are able to visualise electrical installation designs of great complexity in buildings as yet not constructed and this has great advantages for our clients in many areas not the least being highly accurate quantity estimation. Whereas ‘guesstimation’ or over-estimation has often been practiced, we provide our clients with highly accurate bills of material costs—and very importantly, headache free construction proceeding smoothly without unpleasant surprises or project overruns in time and money.

The virtual world of electrical contracting is being used and further developed at Nilsen. Take the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, a massive project, which at this stage is still a ‘hole in the ground’ on the corner of North and West Terraces in Adelaide’s CBD. Once in operation, some time in 2016 it will be an 800-bed hospital. Nilsen engineering personnel are on site and checking the most detailed parts of the electrical installation using three-dimensional models of the buildings and special surveying instrumentation to ‘pace out’ where main switchboards, risers, control panels, etc are going to be placed. And the complexity of new Royal Adelaide hospital is huge. There will be eight substations, sixteen transformers, multiple ring mains, twenty main switchboards, six-hundred plus switchboards, two data centres, and over fifty floor sub-distribution panels.

Projects of this scale require the very best of design offices—and that is what we are about at Nilsen. Although there is yet no building in existence, our design team is on site interfacing with the building construction team, consulting engineers and architects. The building plans are embedded in software that forms part of Nilsen’s design package, and our engineering personnel, able to interact with the design as though it already existed, can pre-empt design conflicts.

The advantages of this method of design are many, one critical aspect being that of avoidance of design clashes—these become apparent in the virtual three D design so that later headaches, cost and time overruns can be avoided. The technology is still quite new to Australian contractors. Nilsen is at the forefront!