The hospital having emergency surgery

The windows on the old Royal Liverpool Hospital looked grotty and tattered. As I entered the reception, the revolving doors moved with a crunch.

As I waited in the main lobby for my guides to the new hospital, I was constantly shifting my position as the amount of people moving through the hospital entrance far exceeded the space available.

And this was in the most modern part of the old building, and is nothing compared to what patients and medical staff have had to put up with.

Earlier this year, BBC series Hospital brought home the reality of how much a new facility is needed when it depicted flooding and an electrical fault disrupting A&E.

The old building should have closed more than two years ago, but delays on its replacement mean it has to continue to function.

Despite the relatively short amount of time I spent there, the contrast inside the new one hit me at every turn.

After walking past the shiny exterior of brand new, thick glass and smart-looking cladding, I was taken straight into a spacious lobby with a large central modern art installation. The room seemed complete, or close to it, but there were cardboard boxes on fittings at ground level and plastic coverings on internal windows.

Escalators that should have been taking patients and doctors to different floors were not yet switched on.

After a ride up in a lift that wasn’t finished but had rough plastic sheets against its sides, I was taken to a floor that will house patients.

It looked clinical, neat and nice. Aside from the empty hand gel dispensers outside what will be patients’ rooms, it looked ready to open. And no wonder: the hospital was originally supposed to be completed by Carillion in 2017.

But two floors up, my eyes opened to just how far there is to go.

Beyond piles of metal fittings that had been stripped out to make way for structural work and stored in a room for possible future use, what should have been an identical ward was almost completely void of any hospital-like features.

Bare walls and concrete slabs replaced the painted surfaces, and the individual patients’ rooms we’d just seen.

It should have been near-identical, and the incredible thing is that it once had been. That floor had been fitted-out and was nearly ready for use.

The hospital was close to 90 per cent complete but after serious structural flaws were identified after Carillion's exit, it has since gone backwards in order to solve the many problems present.

Laing O’Rourke is now working on site, trying to secure the structure – which Arup identified as being at risk.

On my tour, I was shown how the structure is being secured, how non-compliant cladding will need to be removed and how everything must be done gradually and with minimal disruption to what had already gone in.

Most people I spoke to told me that they had never worked on anything like the Royal Liverpool. (You can read more about that here).

One said: “We’re investigating the issues of what went wrong but we’re just determined to give it to the city, that’s what the city is crying out for.”

Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust interim chief executive Dr Peter Williams had worked at the old hospital in the 1980s and had been involved in the design of where clinical features would be based in the new one.

He summed up his feelings: “I was really looking forward to working here as medical director, and now I don’t know when I’m going to be in here.”

We all hope, for the sake of the patients having to use the old hospital, that it will be as soon as possible.