The new Royal Adelaide Hospital has been an exciting, yet massively expensive project for SA, troubled by ongoing construction defects. How can we ensure our investment is spent wisely on safe and efficient structures in the future?

An investment for SA

The construction of a new Royal Adelaide Hospital should be a great addition to the city, but the construction process has been plagued by expensive mistakes, and is still unfinished, well over a year past the original due date. Tax payers are left wondering why our investment has been so mismanaged.

Auditing & Compliance have been forgotten

Independent quality auditing can be employed on large projects to ensure contractors are following construction and safety procedures, and the project is compliant and efficient. Obviously there has been an oversight in the quality management here (or several).

Besides the structure itself, a hospital also contains many safety-critical items, such as autoclaves, boilers, pressure vessels and refrigeration plants. These plant items should all be registered with SafeWork SA, inspected for compliance at the outset, and at ongoing intervals. As an Inspection Body, we have seen firsthand the huge number of items that are non-compliant, and owners that are not aware of the risks and liabilities. When so much of the construction has been mismanaged or overlooked, how can we trust the safety-critical plant items installed in the RAH are up to scratch?

The best way to avoid mistakes

As an Adelaide-based inspection and quality-assurance business, we have expressed our concerns to the Industry Advocate for SA, the small business minister, the Industry Capability Network, to anyone and everyone that we could contact that is a manager or engineer for the site. There seems to be a widespread unwillingness to deal with these issues, perhaps due to the already ballooning expense of the build. In the long term though, auditing, inspection and compliance is the best way to avoid expensive mistakes and accidents.