FEATURE ARTICLES

Two ‘state-of-the-art’ new hospital wards have opened at the Western Community Hospital in Southampton, providing specialist rehabilitation care to people living in and around the area. Their opening has seen patients and staff re-located to the new facilities from two ageing rehabilitation wards at the nearby Royal South Hants Hospital.

Jan Kroman, a Principal at Canada’s Rockliff Pierzchajlo Kroman Architects, based in Edmonton, Alberta, discusses a project to create a new Emergency Department at the city’s Misericordia Community Hospital.

Simon Witts, a director at VA Sciences – a scientific consultancy based in Vermont, Victoria, in Australia, which offers a fully developed suite of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) services, discusses the integration of heat pumps into existing hospital systems. He examines the challenges and necessary adaptations for replacing traditional gas-fired systems with heat pump technology during the electrification process.

Jeff Penner, a Senior Associate at Verne Reimer Architecture in Winnipeg, Canada, discusses the design of new long-term care facility in the Arctic in Canada’s largest, easternmost, and northernmost territory, built on the foundation of Inuit cultural awareness, dignity, and respect.

Simon Everett, a Senior lecturer in the Built Environment and Programme Leader at Wrexham University, and Dr Scott Brown, managing director and lead consultant for Health Tech Solutions, discuss the importance of healthcare estate management teams maintaining up-to-date and sufficiently comprehensive Operations Manuals for each key engineering and EFM discipline, and some of the main elements to include.

Lisa Ward, Product Line manager (UK & France) at Jeld-Wen –a designer, manufacturer, and distributor of high-performance interior and exterior doors, windows, and related building products, explores ‘the evolution of hospital design’, with the incorporation of colour and cues from nature contributing to more effective treatment, increased staff wellbeing, and a better bottom line.

As more and more NHS Trusts refresh ageing entertainment technology, they are also exploring ways to inform, educate, and stimulate patients. So says Dean Moody, Healthcare Services director at Airwave Healthcare, who here explains why momentum is building to enhance patient experience and reduce pressures on busy healthcare professionals.

David Llewellyn, CEO of the Vending & Automated Retail Association, discusses the features and benefits of the latest food and drink vending machines in healthcare facilities.

Schneider Electric has recently published a ‘white paper’, The Rise of the All-Electric Hospital, based on piece of research conducted by its global solutions team, which analyses the impact of electrifying a large acute hospital, and some of the key considerations. While the analysis itself is theoretical, it was applied to an actual hospital in Australia, as the company’s Global Segment director for Healthcare, David Evans, explains.

Anil Madan, Non-Residential Marketing manager at Ideal Standard UK and Armitage Shanks, reports on an Armitage Shanks 2024 Water Safety Forum hosted at the London Design and Specification Centre in Clerkenwell, which brought together experts from across the healthcare sector to explore the question, ‘How can the drive to Net Zero in the NHS be compatible with safe water delivery?’

Simon Lovegrove, CEO of MHealth, who has considerable experience as the lead on, or as a contributor to, the development of over 150 hospitals globally, and has managed major hospitals and other healthcare facilities in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and China, explains why – based on his own experience – he believes integrated hospitals achieve greater efficiency, and create more opportunity to draw the healthcare facility into the community, while simultaneously providing better continuity of care.

In the first two of three infection prevention and control (‘IPC’)-themed articles published late last year in HEJ (October and November 2024) from senior architects at HLM, associate director for healthcare, Neil Orpwood, and head of Healthcare, Melanie Jacobsen Cox, focused on the need for early collaboration between designers, architects, and IPC teams, in creating safe healthcare environments, and an apparent lack of knowledge on the subject among some healthcare design teams. In the third, Neil Orpwood explains how HLM developed an improved internal design tool to help its architects implement, manage, and track, IPC design, derogation, and risk.

The opening Day One keynote session at last year’s Healthcare Estates conference saw three complementary presentations on the importance of engineering, the challenges of recruiting more engineers to help address current and anticipated skills shortages, and some of the work by the Engineering Council, EngineeringUK, and the NHS England NHS Estates and Facilities team – working in tandem – to strengthen and grow the engineering workforce, enhance training and career development, and ensure high professional standards.

At Healthcare Estates 2024, three speakers representing large organisations – NHS England, multinational professional services partnership, EY, and the healthcare division of Siemens AG, discussed some of today’s major workforce challenges and opportunities.

NHS England has recently published several new guidance documents to help NHS Trusts better understand and comply with the Building Safety Act as regards both new and existing buildings undergoing construction work

Ceiling systems play a key role in creating appropriate room acoustics, and as noise levels in healthcare settings and the quality of the interior environment are known to considerably impact recovery and patient wellbeing, making the right choice should be a key consideration for specifiers such as healthcare estates teams, says Simon Humphrey, Technical manager at acoustic ceiling manufacturer, OWA.

Jenna Davies, Global Product manager, Clinical Waste Management, at Vernacare, discusses the risks surrounding needlestick injuries in healthcare facilities, and emphasises that all staff should be trained in how to work safely with sharps, how to safely dispose of them, and what to do if an injury occurs.

In the second in a series of three articles on an infection and prevention control theme from the established architectural practice – the first appeared in the October 2024 HEJ – Melanie Jacobsen Cox, head of Healthcare at HLM Architects, considers some of the key infection and prevention and control (IPC) challenges healthcare design teams face, and suggests there is still a lack of sufficient knowledge on the subject among many such teams designing hospitals and other healthcare buildings.

Paul Moores, a founding director of FBW Group based in Kampala, Uganda, since 1998, describes the practice’s work, following initial design by another firm, to lead the African design and technical team to take forward a specialist postgraduate medical and research training centre in Malawi’s second biggest city.

Martin Bissell, Emily Scoones, and James Thomson of Buildings (Digital) at global architecture, engineering, and consultancy company, Ramboll, argue that to stand a realistic chance of meeting its tough Net Zero targets within the timelines currently specified, the healthcare sector must adopt a multi-faceted approach. By embracing digital building tools and data, they say the sector has the chance to take meaningful steps to decarbonise existing building stock and achieve Net Zero targets, while simultaneously reducing its energy spend.