FEATURE ARTICLES

Tom Davies, Sales manager for Energy Control at fortop Automation & Energy Control (fortop UK), explores how improving power quality and energy management is essential for healthcare estates teams in the quest to achieve Net Zero carbon goals.

Paul Chivers of PCC Sustainable Solutions – an independent SME and Programme / Project manager for innovation and sustainability across PPE, medical devices, and facilities, discusses recent work to examine, and then verify, the effectiveness of novel ways to reprocess reuseable anaesthetic masks, other PPE, and medical devices, using technologies such as UVC, in the process considerably reducing energy and water consumption across the NHS.

Anil Madan, Non-Residential Marketing manager at Ideal Standard UK and Armitage Shanks, looks at some of the advantages of pressure-balancing valves (PBVs) in healthcare water systems. He says PBVs can offer ‘a simpler, more cost-effective, and lower maintenance alternative’ to the ‘traditional’ TMV for suitably risk-assessed environments such as non-critical care settings.

Sharon Cook, Healthcare lead at P+HS Architects, reflects on how the 10 WELL Concept areas were embedded into the design of the Northumbria Health and Care Academy, the UK’s first healthcare building to achieve WELL Gold certification, creating a workplace that the practice says ‘champions wellbeing, connection, and clinical excellence’.

The NHS estate is under increasing strain due to underinvestment, rising demand, and a £13.8 bn maintenance backlog. While high-quality estate is available, much of it remains underutilised, and optimising these assets is essential as the NHS shifts towards out-of-hospital care. Here, Baxendale Senior consultant, Kelsey Price, and head of Healthcare Estate Planning, Jim Brooks, and Abintra director, Tony Booty, argue that by combining sensor data with local knowledge, organisations can ‘uncover hidden capacity, optimise space, and reduce reliance on outdated buildings’. They explain how the two businesses are ‘helping healthcare organisations make smarter estate decisions’.

David Hemming, a highly experienced Chartered Civil Engineer who heads the Estate and Major Programme area within the NHS Shared Business Services Consulting team, argues that the so-called ‘Golden Thread’ – a complete digital record of information about a building, from its design and construction, to its ongoing maintenance and use – ‘represents a fundamental cultural shift in how buildings are designed, constructed, and maintained’. He warns that failure to maintain an accurate, accessible, and up-to-date Golden Thread ‘is no longer merely poor practice – it represents serious corporate risk’.

Alan Wilson, managing director of ModuleCo Healthcare (MCH), a provider of modular healthcare buildings in the UK, explains how – with budgets especially tight – modular construction, utilising a usage-based revenue agreement solution, enables NHS Trusts to ‘access state-of-the-art healthcare facilities without the huge capital investments typically required’.

International healthcare consultancy, MJ Medical, is helping a local community bring healthcare to its high street. By refurbishing a derelict supermarket in Helston, it hopes to bring life into the Cornish town, and show what can be achieved across the UK, as director, Kieren Morgan reports.

With around 6.5 million people on NHS waiting lists in England, and a limiting factor in reducing this list a lack of space for consultations and procedures, plus a longer-term trend in the NHS and globally towards delivering more healthcare outside hospital settings, Smriti Singh, MD of Symbi Consulting, and Jacqui Baxter, a director at View 10D, argue that repurposing existing vacant local authority properties for healthcare provides a solution which helps both financially challenged councils, and the NHS.

Addressing delegates from across the healthcare engineering and estate management sector in a morning keynote at the IHEEM Wales Regional Conference at the ICC Wales in May, Stuart Douglas, Director of NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership – Specialist Estates Services, focused on some of the key priorities to ensure that Wales has a fit-for-purpose healthcare estate. Areas covered included the need to make the optimal use of under- or unused buildings and land, the challenges of reaching Net Zero, and some of the existing and emerging tools for better managing the over two million square metres of space that currently make up the country’s NHS estate.

Nearly 250 guests from across the healthcare engineering, estate management, and healthcare construction sectors gathered in the Augusta Suite at the Celtic Manor Golf Club on 7 May for a Gala Awards Dinner on the first night of the IHEEM Wales Regional Conference and Exhibition 2025, held at the Celtic Manor Resort Hotel near Newport. There, as HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports, they were able to network, witness the presentation of seven awards, hear about the work of local children’s charity, Sparkle, and enjoy a wry and retrospective after-dinner speech by Sir Gareth Edwards CBE, arguably Wales’s greatest ever rugby scrum-half.

Alex Warren, an associate director at The Manser Practice, an award-winning architectural firm specialising in healthcare design, discusses the positive impact that good interior design, signage, and wayfinding, can make in a range of healthcare facilities, for patients, staff, and visitors alike.

We breathe, on average, 12 times per minute, 720 times per hour, and 17,280 times a day, but how do we know that our healthcare buildings are safe and healthy when it comes to air quality? Renée Jacobs, Healthcare Business Development manager at Distech Controls, discusses the importance of good indoor air quality, and some of the steps that can be taken to maintain healthy indoor environments for all users of such facilities using ‘integrated systems and connected technology’.

As one of the largest real estate owners in the UK, the NHS is under pressure to optimise its assets’ health and reduce its carbon footprint. Like many NHS facilities, St George’s Hospital in south London must deliver adequate clinical services, efficiently. After securing sustainability funds, the hospital’s team enlisted multiple specialists to help it improve consumption and asset performance. Dave Lister, a Healthcare Solutions specialist at monitoring solutions integrator, IAconnects, explains how the hospital embraced environmental monitoring.

Mark Roberts, UK Public Sector director at Jaggaer, takes a look at the potential impact on the healthcare sector of the Procurement Act 2023, which came into force in February, and outlines technology’s role in, for example, complying with the new requirement to continuously monitor supplier performance and ethical behaviour throughout a contract’s lifecycle.

As architects, specifiers, and Estates and Facilities managers work to ensure the safety of hospital staff, patients, and visitors, passive fire protection measures (such as fire-resistant glass) can play a vital role. Faced with balancing functionality, wellbeing, design, and safety, demanding more from your fire safety glass specifications is essential, says Andy Lake, Sales director, UK & Ireland, at Pyroguard – a specialist in the manufacture of such glass.

In this ‘Q&A’-style article, James Weber, Marketing manager at SFG20, the UK industry standard for building maintenance, talks to Mathew Houghton, IT lead for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, to understand how – as the latter puts it – he got back an entire working day per week of time savings using SFG20 content and software.

Given the ongoing need for healthcare providers to balance form with function when it comes to interior furnishings, surfaces are one such area where estate stakeholders can make efficiency gains, while also ensuring cleanability, antimicrobial protection, and durability, in line with rigorous standards. George Emms, Specification leader, UK & Ireland, at Wilsonart, sets out some of key considerations when specifying surfaces for the modern healthcare estate.

Harm Hollander, a practising Australian architect who has driven the design and procurement teams of major hospital projects around Australia and internationally, Oystein Tronstad, Physiotherapy clinical lead at The Prince Charles Hospital, Brisbane, and an experienced ICU clinician and researcher, and architect and clinical planner, Angelo Pagano, describe a research project undertaken at the Brisbane hospital which has looked to improve ICU bed bay environments through a variety of measures – from mitigating unwanted noise and incorporating distractive ceiling panels, to enhancing indoor air quality. The scheme was the subject of a post-occupancy evaluation.

Con McGarry, Senior consultant and Solution lead for Digital x Healthcare* at Arcadis, discusses how – against a backdrop where many healthcare organisations worldwide are determining how they move closer to a digital technology-enabled future – the journey from concept to actual implementation remains challenging. He advocates ‘an approach that goes beyond technology acquisition’, using a Strategic Technology Roadmap ‘rooted in understanding the distinct challenges that an organisation faces and quantifying them’.