Schindler Lifts Australia has been honoured with the 2017 Elevator World Project of the Year award by Elevator World Inc. for their work on the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) in Melbourne.
A purpose-built centre-of-excellence for cancer research, treatment, education and care located in Melbourne’s prestigious Parkville Biomedical Precinct, the VCCC is designed to deliver maximum functional area with a blend of clinical, administrative and research facilities. The VCCC was designed by Silver Thomas Hanley, DesignInc and McBride Charles Ryan for the Plenary Health consortium in partnership with the Victorian Government.
Delivered under a public-private partnership, the project saw the Victorian Government contracting the Plenary Health consortium comprising of Plenary Group, the Grocon/ PCL builder joint venture and facilities manager Honeywell to design, build, finance and maintain the project under a 25-year concession. Schindler partnered with Plenary Health, the team tasked with delivering this facility to execute the VCCC vision.
Describing the VCCC installation, Schindler Australia Managing Director Rob Seakins explains that their PORT Technology coupled with their S7000 and S5500 products has created a unique user experience in a hospital type environment.
Featuring 23 elevators, the 130,000-square-metre VCCC is the only hospital in Australia that uses a dedicated elevator destination control system. Schindler was able to demonstrate that it had the right experience, knowledge and technology to meet the client’s specifications and ensure seamless movement of passengers through the building.
Key features of Schindler’s installation at VCCC include dedicated lift banks for the clinical and research areas, each operating on a group traffic control, with a number of priority recalls for special duties; recalls ranked according to priority level with specific lifts allocated to respond to these recalls; public lifts separated from clinical lifts, research staff lifts, and service elevators; each lift connected into a site wide Remote Lift Monitoring System (RLMS), which provides real time monitoring, alarm, diagnostic performance and traffic handling information on screen displays and hard copy output; and RLMS providing control functionality to dispatch lifts during evacuation and other required lockdown scenarios.
Given the hospital environment, all lift motor equipment has been vibration isolated from the building structure by employing measures such as lift rail isolators, larger than standard lift guide rollers and multi-layer pad isolators for lift machines.
Lift cars and landing displays have programmable LCD or LED displays (where allocated) to indicate lift position, direction of travel, lift status and service. This can include priority call, exclusive use, fireman service and where specified, video and messages.
Priority recalls such as emergency response team, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and critical care patient transfer are supported by a dedicated lift use function. When a recall is registered, a nominated lift is taken from group control and sent to the floor on which the recall originated. For catering and other services requiring dedicated usage for extended periods, the lift can be placed onto ‘exclusive use’ by the user once it has responded to the recall. The lift car can also be driven to another floor exclusively without a passenger when hazardous materials are being transported.
Schindler’s scope of work for the project also included developing customised multimedia instructional videos as part of the training and induction packs that VCCC Management shared with employees, residents and guests.
