Mireille Gillings Neuroimaging Centre

Some hospital buildings have to stand alone. Not as an afterthought bolted onto a corridor, but as a place designed around scanners, patients and the research that sits behind the machines.

The Mireille Gillings Neuroimaging Centre at Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital is that kind of building: a standalone, single-storey facility for PET-CT and MRI, created to support research, diagnosis and therapy. M&O Building Contractors delivered the new build. Roundtable Projects provided project quantity surveying and commercial management throughout, in association with M&O. We do not claim to have built the hospital or the scanners. We claim the trust work on the numbers.

The site started as car park. Porta cabins had to clear. Sheet piling secured the groundworks. The shell was built in seven-newton block cavity wall, finished with timber cladding, bespoke signage and landscaping so the centre reads as a composed piece of hospital estate rather than a temporary add-on. Inside, specialist clinical rooms and supporting infrastructure had to line up with equipment requirements from the first commercial decisions, not as a late scramble after the walls were already up.

Our commercial role mirrored the pattern we take on other M&O healthcare schemes. Full supply chain procurement. Subcontractor valuations and accounts. Client valuations. Change management and extensions of time. Monthly cost reporting, site attendance and a final account that closed the story cleanly. On a design and build form (JCT Design and Build 2016 with amendments), that discipline matters. Design development and site reality move together, and the QS has to keep both visible to the people who are writing cheques and making clinical decisions.

Standalone neuroimaging buildings carry a particular commercial risk: specialist packages and long-lead equipment can drift away from the main contract story if nobody joins them up. Our job was to keep those threads in one place so M&O could deliver the building without the commercial picture fragmenting.

The finished centre gives the hospital a dedicated setting for neuroimaging. Roundtable’s claim on the public site stays commercial and clear: we helped M&O manage cost and change so the project could be explained at every stage.

We build trust first. Projects second. In Exeter, that meant a clear association with M&O and a commercial story fit for a specialist clinical building.