Vanessa Brady says one of the things she is most proud of after overseeing the construction in 37 days of Canberra's $23 million pop-up coronavirus hospital, is that the facility has not been needed.
Mrs Brady, the program director of Canberra Health Service's Canberra Hospital campus modernisation program, was last week recognised at the National Association of Women in Construction's ACT awards.
Mrs Brady won the innovation in the construction industry award.
She said when she was first briefed on the project - after being called to the Canberra Hospital on a Sunday in the first nervous period of the pandemic - modelling showed the ACT would have several hundred cases in six weeks. That was the deadline set for delivering the new hospital.
"I had a very strong sense that ... after that we had completed and run all the commissioning scenarios on that facility, that there would be patients there the next day. I think that was a very strong motivation for all of us: stay true to time, because time mattered most on this particular project," Mrs Brady said.
The hospital, which was delivered in collaboration with Major Projects Canberra and Aspen Medical, was custom designed in consultation with the World Health Organisation and set a world-leading example.
Completed in May, the hospital has not been used to treat COVID-19 patients, but has served as a testing facility for the virus.
