IN Brief:
- The £300m Children’s Cancer Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital has moved further into specialist package delivery.
- Dalkia will deliver the MEP scope on Sisk’s central London healthcare project.
- The scheme reinforces the growing role of low-carbon building services in complex public-sector healthcare construction.
Dalkia has secured the mechanical, electrical and public health package for the £300m Children’s Cancer Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital, joining Sisk on one of the capital’s most technically demanding live healthcare construction programmes.
The project is being delivered on a constrained central London hospital estate, where construction activity must be planned around continuing clinical operations. Piling is due to complete this month, with the new centre scheduled to welcome its first patients in 2029.
The facility will bring together cancer care, research, and support spaces in a purpose-built environment designed for children and young people. Behind that clinical brief sits a demanding building services requirement, with resilience, infection control, comfort, ventilation, energy performance, and operational continuity all shaping the MEP scope.
On hospital projects of this scale, MEP delivery is not a downstream fit-out exercise. Services strategy defines how the building functions from day one, from air handling and electrical resilience to heating, cooling, water systems, controls, alarms, specialist equipment support, and maintainability across the life of the asset.
The GOSH package follows Dalkia’s recent UK margin recovery, where nuclear, healthcare, systems integration, and low-carbon work helped the EDF-backed contractor strengthen its 2025 performance. The company’s latest appointment places that technical services capability inside a high-profile NHS development with significant operational constraints.
Healthcare construction is moving steadily towards more integrated, low-carbon building systems. Hospital clients are seeking energy efficiency and carbon reduction, but they cannot trade away resilience, redundancy, or clinical reliability. That tension is changing the role of specialist contractors, which are increasingly expected to help resolve carbon, compliance, and performance requirements before installation begins.
The live-site setting adds another layer of difficulty. Noise, dust, vibration, access, infection control, deliveries, temporary services, and emergency routes all have to be managed around an operating hospital. Those constraints affect sequencing as much as technical design, particularly where plant, risers, ceilings, clinical spaces, and commissioning activities must be coordinated within a crowded programme.
For Sisk, the award strengthens the project team as the scheme moves beyond enabling and substructure activity. For Dalkia, it adds another major healthcare reference to a portfolio increasingly shaped by technical complexity, decarbonisation, and critical building performance.
The centre also reflects a wider shift in public-sector healthcare construction. New hospitals and specialist clinical buildings are now expected to meet much higher expectations around carbon, patient experience, digital capability, maintainability, and long-term estate resilience. Delivering those ambitions depends heavily on the quality of services design and installation, particularly in buildings where failure is not merely inconvenient but operationally critical.
