Spain’s new €50 million emergency hospital in Madrid could see first stone laid next week

Madrid’s new €50 million emergency hospital, which will specialise in pandemics, could see the first stone laid next week.

FOURTEEN companies will build the capital’s new Valdebebas Emergency Hospital, chosen from 49 applicants.

And the project, announced earlier this month by President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is moving forward rapidly with work expected to start next week, with a view to completion in the autumn.

The draft project is already in the hands of the Madrid City Council, which has given its urban planning approval, while the Governing Council “will soon approve it”, Alejo Miranda, general director of Health Infrastructures of the Community of Madrid, told La Razon.

He stressed that the project had already been awarded to 14 companies within the architecture, engineering and topography sector, and the “the first stone could be laid next week”.

A project on the scale of the hospital would normally take about seven months to complete, said Miranda, and its tendering procedure between five and eight months.

But he added, “public interest” prompted the Community of Madrid to shorten the time frame “as much as possible”.

The 40,000 sqm facility will be organised in three sections, housing almost 1,000 beds, diagnostic imaging areas, laboratory and multipurpose rooms, a memorial for the victims of the Covid-19 and a monument dedicated to health professionals.

But it will not only deal with a possible resurgence of coronavirus.

“We are talking about, in addition to this circumstance, the usual seasonal epidemics of flu and bronchiolitis, so that the three would coexist,” reports La Razon.

“The pandemic has made us change the structure of our health system,” he said, adding “that is why the model of this new centre is defined by its versatility, so that it can deal with both a possible resurgence and other types of accidents that, hopefully, we will never have to experience”.