Willmott Dixon has topped out the £140m Emergency Care Building at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, marking the structural completion of the first Wave 1 scheme in the Government’s New Hospital Programme to begin main construction.
The four-storey building is being delivered for University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust and will provide purpose-built accommodation for urgent and emergency care serving Plymouth, South Devon and Cornwall.
The scheme is due to complete in April 2029 and will include an expanded Emergency Department on the ground floor.
The existing emergency department will subsequently be reconfigured as a dedicated Paediatric ED.
A Same Day Emergency Care unit will occupy the first floor, while the upper floors will contain four interventional radiology theatres and five new surgical theatres for emergency and planned procedures.
Once operational, the new facilities will provide close to twice the capacity of the existing 50-year-old Emergency Department, which is one of the busiest in the South West.
The project has reached the topping-out stage following the installation of 10,900 cubic metres of concrete and 1,900 tonnes of recycled steel reinforcement.
Willmott Dixon said the building’s frame has been designed to reduce embodied carbon, with 55% of the cement content replaced with ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS), a by-product of iron and steel production.
The approach has saved an estimated 1,625 tonnes of carbon in the concrete used to date.
The scheme is being procured through ProCure23 and is among the first New Hospital Programme projects designed to meet the NHS Net Zero Building Standard.
Willmott Dixon was appointed in March 2026 as one of 10 construction partners to the Hospital 2.0 Alliance, the delivery vehicle for the New Hospital Programme.
The contractor was also named construction partner for the new Women and Children’s Hospital at the Royal Cornwall Hospital site in Truro in July.
The contractor said local employment and training opportunities are also being created through the project, including apprenticeships and employment support programmes, while local suppliers are being used across the supply chain.
“Reaching this topping out milestone is a fantastic achievement and a testament to the truly collaborative approach that has defined this project from the very beginning,” said Stephen Ford, Project Director at Willmott Dixon.
