Clínica Girona

The Catalonian hospital group Clinica Girona has started construction of their newest hospital building in Girona, Spain. The state-of-the-art medical center is expected to open in the first half of 2022 and will expand the capacity of the current clinic from 13,000 m² to 41,000 m².

The hospital will house several diagnostic centers, surgery rooms, a rehabilitation center, an oncology wing and much more, making it the largest and most complete medical facility in Catalonia.

Because of its proximity to the railway tracks, CDM Stravitec engineers were asked to come up with a solution to protect both patients, staff and medical equipment from structure and airborne noise.

An impressive number of pre-compressed Stravibase SpringBox bearings are installed on top of the load bearing columns, isolating the building structure and thus preventing unwanted noise and vibrations from the nearby high-speed railway from creating an acoustical problem inside the hospital and protecting the sensitive medical equipment. In total, 600 Stravibase SpringBox bearings acoustically decouple the substructure from the superstructure.

Most underground areas didn’t need to be acoustically isolated and so, it proved to be more efficient to opt for acoustic floating floors in those sensitive underground areas that did require special attention, rather than adapting the whole building design in order to bring Stravibase SpringBox isolation to the -1 level.

Over 645 m² of Stravifloor Jackup-R floating floors, using 4.5Hz springs as resilient support and a 150 mm-thick concrete slab were installed in the hemodialysis and nuclear medicine wards located on the -1 level of the hospital.

As it is a unit where patients often spend many hours undergoing chronic therapy, it was of paramount importance to ensure patient comfort through optimal acoustics. The nuclear medicine ward on the other hand, had to be acoustically isolated to protect the sensitive medical equipment located here.