FEATURE ARTICLES

For Eastwood Park, 2019 is more significant than most. This year the long-established training centre celebrates 50 years of delivering specialist engineering, decontamination, and estates and facilities management training. Helen Cornes, senior marketing executive at the Gloucestershire training facility, looks back at its development, and at how its course portfolio has both adapted and expanded over the years, in line with the significant changes in the sector.

Working with UK thermometer manufacturer, TM Electronics UK, hospital estate managers in the States of Guernsey are using ‘practical, low cost temperature strategies’ to speed up and simplify water temperature monitoring across their healthcare estate, as well as to ensure that their hospitals’ water systems comply with the demanding requirements of the Department of Health & Social Care’s HTM 04-01 and the HSE’s ACoP ‘L8’ guidance on the control of Legionella in water systems.

Peter Bellis, managing director of Lancashire-based building services consulting engineers, A P Bellis & Associates, discusses the challenges of a complete refurbishment and refit of of one of the operating theatres at Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal in Cumbria.

In September’s HEJ, the architectural practice that designed the Rutherford Cancer Centre North East in Northumberland, JDDK Architects, discussed some of the key thinking behind the facility’s creation.

Colin Dobbyne MIET, an experienced product designer, and the founder of Big Blue Solutions, says he is ‘passionate about empowering clinicians to make better decisions by connecting operating theatres to create a constant feedback loop for research and development’.

Four Master’s students in Mechanical/Electronic Engineering at the University of Portsmouth have recently undertaken a project looking at ‘excessively high’ noise levels in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Here they report on the findings of their research – which included surveying the public – and highlight a number of potential active and passive control measures to take to make such environments quieter and more ‘calming’.

Mark Jackson, deputy director of Estates, Facilities and IT at The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, considers the key benefits he has seen from his experience of implementing DFN Project SEARCH’s innovative training programme across three different Trusts.

Effective environmental monitoring of ambient spaces housing everything from a catering operation to wards is key for safe, appropriate conditions in hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

A look at some of the key considerations in ensuring safe preparation and delivery of healthy food to hospital patients.

Steam continues to play an important role in serving the requirements of modern healthcare facilities. Angelo Giambrone, Business Development manager at Spirax Sarco UK, discusses the influence of this versatile medium on our day-to-day living, and explains why the healthcare sector should continue to embrace steam as an integral component of a 21st-century hospital.

Washroom services provider, Simply Washrooms, discusses how factors including insufficient hand hygiene, difficult-to-clean surfaces, and poor air quality, can lead to the proliferation of harmful bacteria in hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

Conor Ellis, head of Healthcare at Rider Levett Bucknall, discusses the need for robust business cases in winning a share of the dwindling capital ‘pot’ for financing new healthcare schemes.

In early May this year the new Royal Papworth Hospital opened to patients on its new site on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. A look at the delivery and implementation of a 4K audio-visual system for the new healthcare facility’s state-of-the-art operating theatres.

The ageing of the population has highlighted the need for inclusive, enabling societies. Dr Evangelia Chrysikou, a lecturer and the Programme director of the new MSc Healthcare Facilities course at the Bartlett Real Estate Institute, UCL, in London, says considerably more thought must also be given to making the built environment more ‘inclusive’.

Designing power protection components – uninterruptible power systems (UPS), emergency lighting inverters, generators, and isolated power supplies – into a hospital or other healthcare facility’s electrical distribution system can be challenging.

A specialist in energy and carbon reduction, infrastructure renewal, operating cost savings, and improved building environments, argues for ‘a logical, pragmatic approach’ in addressing an ageing estate and an increasing critical backlog.

Electrical engineer, Luigi D’Alessio MIHEEM, of engineering consultancy, Eta Projects, explains how a ‘FiveYear Risk Based Condition Report’ can form the cornerstone of a robust business continuity plan to ensure that NHS organisations comply with their duty to have in place continuity arrangements under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Architects, Sheppard Robson, have masterminded the internal design of the £167 m Molecular Sciences Research Hub on the Imperial College London’s White City Campus, described by the College as ‘the UK’s most significant scientific development since the Francis Crick Institute’.

With a particular focus on washroom technology – ‘from handwashing to basin design’, Ideal Standard’s Senior Sector marketing manager, Tony Rheinberg, explores the theme, ‘How can we anticipate the issues of the future, and design for them?’ He argues that, even where capital is scarce, investment in up-to-date technology will pay dividends long term

Kevin Belben, Technical Applications manager at water management specialists Cistermiser and Keraflo, discuss ‘the evolution of water temperature monitoring systems’, and how harnessing The Internet of Things is helping to improve patient safety and estate efficiency, and, he claims, offers the potential to save the healthcare sector ‘millions of pounds’ every year.