The new Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) National Centre facility is due to be completed at the end of 2016. The £33 million (by construction value) project is being delivered by Interserve Kajima and will centralise the processing, treatment and screening of all blood, cells and tissues collected in Scotland. This will deliver significant efficiencies in the journey of collected blood, helping to meet the increasing demand for blood transfusions for patients in Scotland. Given that over a million pints of donated blood spoil every year in the UK and the number of new blood donors fell last year by nearly 40 percent, the innovations of this centre could literally be life-saving.

Dr Safia Qureshi, SNBTS National Centre Project Director, says: “Having the right facilities in the right place is key to the efficient and effective delivery of our services to patients across Scotland and that is why we are working with Interserve Kajima to ensure our blood service is delivered from state-of-the-art facilities. Not only will the new centre ensure ongoing compliance in an increasingly complex regulatory environment, but it will facilitate the effective introduction of new developments, products and safety measures in a flexible, future-proof building.”

Richard Coe, Project Director for Interserve Kajima (who works for Kajima Partnerships) has been involved in the project for three years and explains how it has been funded: “This project initially came to the market as a capitally funded project, that all fell by the wayside with difficulties in public sector financing, and then came back to the market as an NPD project – in recent years Scottish Procuring Authorities have progressed an increasing number of privately financed projects using the Non Profit Distributing (NPD) model. The NPD model was developed and introduced as an alternative to and has since superseded the traditional Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model in Scotland. So we funded the National Centre through Nord/LB, we’re building it with Interserve Construction and we’re going to operate it through the 25 year concession with Interserve Facilities Management.”

Read the rest of this article in the February edition of Construction Global by clicking here.