The Royal Liverpool University Hospital (RLUH) is a major teaching and research hospital located in the city of Liverpool, England. It is the largest and busiest hospital in Merseyside and Cheshire, and has the largest emergency department of its kind in the UK. A major redevelopment of the hospital began in 2013 and was scheduled for completion in 2017, but construction problems and the 2018 collapse of main contractor Carillion pushed the estimated completion date back to the autumn of 2022. Alongside Broadgreen Hospital and Liverpool University Dental Hospital, the hospital is managed by the Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and is associated with the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. History Former hospital The former hospital, originally known simply as the Royal Liverpool Hospital, was designed to replace three other city centre acute hospitals that existed at the time – the Liverpool Royal Infirmary on Pembroke Place, the David Lewis Northern Hospital on Great Howard Street, and the Royal Southern Hospital on Caryl Street. It had been agreed to amalgamate the separate facilities on a site in close proximity to the University of Liverpool for the purposes of medical education and research. The site on which the current hospital now stands (on Prescot Street) was identified as part of the post-war regeneration of Liverpool. However, building on the main hospital did not commence until 1963. The first phase of the hospital was designed by Holford Associates and built by Alfred McAlpine between 1963 and 1969. The construction was plagued from the outset by problems of cost, time and quality, together with difficulties over fire certification due to changes in health and safety law whilst building work was ongoing. The second phase was completed and the hospital eventually opened in 1978. Redevelopment In December 2013 the landmark £429 million redevelopment of the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, procured under a Private Finance Initiative contract, reached financial close; its collaborative links with the University of Liverpool, and institutes on the Liverpool BioCampus, have given the city of Liverpool recognition as one of the leading UK centres for health research and innovation. The new Royal Liverpool University Hospital, which was designed by NBBJ and HKS and was being built by Carillion, was expected to be the largest all single-patient room hospital in the UK upon its originally scheduled completion of March 2017. In March