Building to beat Ebola: the Royal Engineers in Sierra Leone

The 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa raised fears of a global pandemic. Specialists from the UK Corps of Royal Engineers were deployed to Sierra Leone to design and construct emergency treatment units, in support of the UK Department for International Development. Whereas projects of this scale typically take several years to plan and deliver, the exponential spread of the disease required that the design, tender and construction programmes were extraordinarily accelerated. Extensive innovation and gruelling programmes ensured that all six treatment units were open and receiving patients within 3 months. This paper outlines the clinical principles underpinning the design of Ebola treatment facilities and chronicles the experience of running multiple major construction sites simultaneously in the developing world during a humanitarian disaster.