The North Carolina Central Prison Regional Medical Center and Mental Health Facility is a fully-operating hospital within the perimeter of a maximum-security, all-male correctional facility. The hospital was construction as two separate buildings, one building provides Health Care services including an emergency room, operating rooms, pre-op/post-op, dialysis, radiation, and chemotherapy. The other building is dedicated to Mental Health services. Donley’s Concrete Group (formerly known as Blair Concrete) provided turnkey concrete construction services to Balfour Beatty Construction, LLC on this $180M project for the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

The scope of work for the Central Prison Regional Medical Center project included:

• foundations constructed over auger cast piles
• mat slabs
• shear walls
• cores for the elevator and stair wells
• cast columns for the multiple structural levels above
• elevated decks

The decks were constructed utilizing metal-pan-type construction in order to maximize the load capacity of the prison floors and the heavy loads of the precast cell blocks. Creating a unique challenge for Donley’s Concrete Group crews was the requirement that both buildings be constructed simultaneously. In order to maintain the critical path, two separate crews—one for each building—were enlisted. Adding an additional layer to the challenge came in managing documents, RFIs, submittals, and change orders as each building had a separate structural engineer.

Both buildings of the new Regional Medical Center and Mental Health Facility are five stories tall. The Health Care building has a full basement, and 120 single-patient medical cells and connects via court yard to the Mental Health building which has been designed for both short and long-term housing, including 216 single-patient mental health cells, with significant program space.