Stantec was selected to lead the design team for the Hamdan Bin Rashid Cancer Hospital, Dubai’s first integrated, comprehensive cancer hospital. Named in honor of the late Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the hospital is scheduled to open to patients in 2026.
The 603,000-sf facility will house 50 clinics, 30 clinical trial areas, 60 infusion rooms, 10 urgent care rooms, 5 radiotherapy rooms, and 116 inpatient beds to meet current and future levels of demand. The fundraising goal for the project is nearly $330 million.
Featuring 19 gardens, green space will be placed throughout the hospital campus, creating a healing space for patients and their families. The hospital will follow a transformative shift in care delivery, moving from a traditional inpatient care model to an ambulatory model. This includes integrating primary care with diagnosis and treatment to offer detection and intervention at earlier stages of the patient’s journey.
As part of Dubai Health, the first integrated academic health system in Dubai, the comprehensive cancer hospital will benefit from a multidisciplinary team, including specialized nursing, offering patients a full spectrum of care from early diagnosis to treatment and supportive care. Select treatments and services will be made available to patients in the comfort of their homes, ensuring an easy and accessible continuum of care.
Research and clinical trials will be at the heart of the hospital, fostering opportunities for discovering the best patient outcomes through personalized, patient-centric, evidence-based care.
“Our design draws inspiration from the Ghaf tree, the UAE’s national tree and a symbol of life, peace, and tolerance,” said David Martin, global design director for Stantec. “The tree often possesses a twisted geometry, reflected in how the new cancer hospital is composed—lower and raised blocks, gently twisted, and including a large court as a center of gravity and focal point. A small grove of Ghaf trees in the square will provide a memorable sense of place and symbolize the rich contribution Hamdan Bin Rashid has made to the health of the community.”
The new hospital will draw in natural daylight while integrating direct contact with nature. The hospital and future phased campus development are centered around promoting the new Hamdan Bin Rashid Square as the heart of a new mini campus, which reduces the institutional feel and destigmatizes the patient experience.
Owner and/or developer: Dubai Health
Design architect: Stantec
Architect of record: POE
MEP engineer: Stantec
Structural engineer: Stantec
General contractor/construction manager: TBD



Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Stimulus funding helps get NOAA project off the ground
The award-winning design for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new Southwest Fisheries Science Center replacement laboratory saw its first sign of movement last month with a groundbreaking ceremony held in La Jolla, Calif. The $102 million project is funded primarily by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
| Aug 11, 2010
National Intrepid Center tops out at Walter Reed
SmithGroup, Turner Construction, and the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund (IFHF), a nonprofit organization supporting the men and women of the United States Armed Forces and their families, celebrated the overall structural completion of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE), an advanced facility dedicated to research, diagnosis, and treatment of military personnel and veterans sufferin...
| Aug 11, 2010
Alabama hospital gets a four-story addition
Birmingham, Ala.-based Hoar Construction has completed the North Tower addition at Thomas Hospital in Fairhope, Ala. The four-story, 123,000-sf addition accommodates an ER on the first floor, 32 private patient rooms and nursing support on the second and third floors, and room for 32 planned patient rooms on the top floor.
| Aug 11, 2010
America's Greenest Hospital
Hospitals are energy gluttons. With 24/7/365 operating schedules and stringent requirements for air quality in ORs and other clinical areas, an acute-care hospital will gobble up about twice the energy per square foot of, say, a commercial office building. It is an achievement worth noting, therefore, when a major hospital achieves LEED Platinum status, especially when that hospital attains 14 ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Hospital Additions + Renovations: 14 Lessons from Expert Building Teams
Two additions to a community hospital in Ohio that will double its square footage. A 12-story addition on top of an existing 12-story tower at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. A $54 million renovation and addition at the University of Virginia Medical Center. A 67-bed, $70 million addition/renovation to a community hospital that is only five years old.
| Aug 11, 2010
Research Facility Breaks the Mold
In the market for state-of-the-art biomedical research space in Boston's Longwood Medical Area? Good news: there are still two floors available in the Center for Life Science | Boston, a multi-tenant, speculative high-rise research building designed by Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Boston, and developed by Lyme Properties, Hanover, N.
| Aug 11, 2010
3 Hospitals, 3 Building Teams, 1 Mission: Optimum Sustainability
It's big news in any city when a new billion-dollar hospital is announced. Imagine what it must be like to have not one, not two, but three such blockbusters in the works, each of them tracking LEED-NC Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. That's the case in San Francisco, where three new billion-dollar-plus healthcare facilities are in various stages of design and constructi...
| Aug 11, 2010
Holyoke Health Center
The team behind the new Holyoke (Mass.) Health Center was aiming for more than the renovation of a single building—they were hoping to revive an entire community. Holyoke's central business district was built in the 19th century as part of a planned industrial town, but over the years it had fallen into disrepair.
| Aug 11, 2010
Right-Sizing Healthcare
Over the past 30 years or so, the healthcare industry has quietly super-sized its healthcare facilities. Since 1980, ORs have bulked up in size by 53%, acute-care patient rooms by 77%. The slow creep went unlabeled until recently, when consultant H. Scot Latimer applied the super-sizing moniker to hospitals, inpatient rooms, operating rooms, and other treatment and administrative spaces.
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Healthcare
11. Operating Room-Integrated MRI will Help Neurosurgeons Get it Right the First Time A major limitation of traditional brain cancer surgery is the lack of scanning capability in the operating room. Neurosurgeons do their best to visually identify and remove the cancerous tissue, but only an MRI scan will confirm if the operation was a complete success or not.