Pentagon Healthy Living Centre

Background 

We were appointed to advise on the refurbishment of  the existing first floor space at the Pentagon Shopping Centre in Chatham to provide an NHS Healthy Living Centre. The Centre will provide two GP practices and a pharmacy, offering routine screenings, consultations, and educational workshops aimed at promoting long-term health and wellbeing.

Lead Architect for the scheme is LSI.

Our Approach 

We established acoustic performance standards to achieve the targeted Hea 05 BREEAM credits and provided initial acoustic strategy plans to assist in the selection of appropriate building methods to maintain privacy ratings between active spaces.  

As the design developed through RIBA Stages 3 and 4, we undertook acoustic design reviews of the architectural and mechanical proposals to ensure the final proposals would achieve the established criteria.

Our acoustic design strategy focused on the following key areas: 

• External Envelope Design and Ventilation Strategy: to control external environmental noise ingress. 
• Internal Airborne Sound Insulation: for separating walls and floors. 
• Impact Sound Transmission Control: to manage noise from footsteps to sensitive spaces below. 
• Reverberation Control: within single-bed wards, multi-bed wards, offices, meeting rooms, and circulation areas. 
• Building Services System Noise Control: to ensure noise-sensitive spaces are protected. 
• External Plant Noise Impact Assessment: on the nearest noise-sensitive receptors. 

Our Recommendations 

During the design development these included: 

• Provision of appropriate partition to mullion junction details to maintain sound insulation performance 
• Additional measures to retained partitions to ensure that sound insulation targets can be achieved.  
• Mechanical Services Noise Criteria: recommendations for services penetrations to acoustically rated partitions. 
• Doorset selections to maintain acoustic privacy following HTM 08-01 guidance. 
• Adjustments to floor finishes to control impact sound transfer such as acoustically back vinyl and acoustic back pedestals where raised access flooring was proposed. 
• Reverberation Control Treatments: suggestions for suitable ceiling treatments. 

We also suggested design opportunities, including: 

• Upgraded Sound Absorbent Finishes: for better noise control in corridors and multi-person rooms.
• Improved Speech Intelligibility: in consultation rooms. 
• Reduced Internal Noise Level Target: for the quiet waiting room, to accommodate patients with sensory needs. 
• Reducing partition buildups: where partitions have been over designed and the acoustic criteria is exceeded. 

Project Progress 

The Healthy Living Centre is due to open in 2025 as part of a wider regeneration project taking place at the Pentagon Shopping Centre.  

With the recommendations made as part of our design input, the BREEAM credits sought are expected to be achievable.