FEATURE ARTICLES

Few beds, one would imagine, could withstand three-quarters of a ton landing on them, but this was the challenge successfully met by a box bed from a furniture manufacturer for challenging behaviour environments, Tough Furniture, when, to reassure a customer that the bed could accommodate 30-stone patients, 13 of the company’s staff jumped repeatedly on it to ensure that it would survive intact in a real-world setting. Such testing may seem extreme, but is vital, since much of the company’s furniture is destined for environments where patients will abuse, and indeed attempt to destroy, components.

Bioliquid is often overlooked by organisations when they look to reduce carbon emissions by moving heating or power generation away from fossil fuels to ‘renewables’.

As flooring specialist, Gerflor, marks over 60 years supplying the healthcare sector, Virginia Harris, the company’s Scottish sales and specification executive, takes a look at some of the recent trends in healthcare flooring, where attractive aesthetics, sustainability, a hard-wearing and robust construction, and cleaning and infection control considerations, are among the key criteria on specifiers’ lists. She also considers the crossover between design and new product development.

David Green, AIA, principal at the London offices of Perkins+Will, and Basak Alkan, AICP, LEED AP / healthcare district planner, at the architect, interior, and urban design company’s Atlanta, US base, examine growing moves in the US to re-evaluate planning policies to ensure that local environments are built that promote healthy activities, with the creation of so-called ‘Health Districts’.

The NHS is costing the taxpayer 2.5 times more than it did 50 years ago. Now accounting for 8.2 per cent of the UK’s GDP, this trend is set to continue, but funding is not in place to support it. The Government faces a struggle between what is needed and what is affordable, pointing to a complete re-think of the way care is delivered. So says Steve Peak, business development director for Vanguard Healthcare, As the 2015 General Election brings the issue into sharper focus, he examines how estates managers are responding to the pressures and the practicalities of delivering the infrastructure to support a new model of care.

With the Waste (Scotland) Regulations 2012, which actually came into effect on 1 January 2014 in Scotland, requiring all the country’s healthcare facilities to separate their waste for recycling, waste management consultants, Jess Twemlow and Dr Adam Read of Ricardo-AEA, consider what healthcare facilities south of the border can learn from Scotland’s experience about improved waste management and resource efficiency.

Writing on behalf of the Building & Engineering Services Association (B&ES), Ewen Rose, an experienced journalist specialising in building engineering services, reports on a number of presentations at October’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates 2014 conference where the focus was very much on how healthcare estates and facilities and healthcare engineering teams can save energy and cut carbon emissions through more efficient monitoring, and, if necessary, subsequent adjustment, of key HVAC plant.

Mark Chapple BSc (Hons) IEng MIHEEM AMCIBSE examines the issue of engineering ethics, and asks ‘whether ethics is an alien word to the engineering profession?’

Despite having only established the company nine years ago, the founders of Kidderminster-based Avensys Medical believe the company now offers not only one of the UK’s most comprehensive maintenance, repair, consultancy, and equipment audit services for medical and dental equipment, but also one of the most tailored training portfolios for electro-biomedical (EBME) engineers working in healthcare settings to enable them to get the best out of such equipment, improve patient safety, optimise service life, and save both the NHS and private sector money.

The following examples illustrate how continuous dosing with SHP can be used successfully to resolve Legionella problems in healthcare and other facilities.These particular cases all utilised EndoSan.

Although temperature control has been the UK’s longest-serving means of controlling the growth and proliferation of Legionella in hot and cold water systems, there are other factors, including major rises in energy costs, that warrant the use of biocides – including in the healthcare sector.

Neil Ashdown, general manager of the Fire Door Inspection Scheme (FDIS), considers the key steps for ensuring that fire doors are correctly specified, installed, maintained, inspected, and, when necessary, repaired, to enable them to effectively fulfil their role.

A major design and build scheme which has seen the inpatient unit at St. Luke’s Hospice in Sheffield extended and refurbished to provide a more comfortable and homely environment, and bring the facilities up to the best 21st century standards, has benefited significantly from both high quality architecture and stakeholder commitment.

Mike Hilditch, managing director of auctioneers, Hilditch Group, which has extensive experience in selling equipment on behalf of the NHS, advises, via a seven-step guide, on some of the key elements for estates and facilities teams to consider to ensure that site clearances both go to plan and reap maximum financial reward, including safeguarding potentially valuable ‘kit’ against opportunist thieves, and preventing confidential paperwork falling into the wrong hands.

In late August last year the St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust in south-west London signed what the Trust’s Estates and Facilities team described as ‘a historic partnership’ with British Gas for a £12 m Energy Performance Contract energy reduction scheme – via which the energy company has guaranteed to deliver £1.1 m in annual savings over the next 15 years. The agreement will see British Gas replace four 35-year-old gas-powered steam boilers and an ageing CHP plant in the boiler house at the Trust’s main acute facility, the St George’s Hospital in Tooting, and upgrade some of the associated infrastructure. British Gas will also maintain the new plant to ensure that the projected savings are achieved while the Trust owns the new assets. The Trust should gain financially – via lower energy costs and carbon emissions, while estates personnel will be better able to complete the many other estate maintenance issues that would otherwise be contracted out at one of London’s biggest acute hospitals.

In mid-November last year Ryhurst signed what it dubbed ‘a ground-breaking strategic estates partnership’ agreement with the Isle of Wight NHS Trust (HEJ – January 2015). Under the Wight Life Partnership, the two organisations will work in partnership ‘to comprehensively review the estate across all the Trust’s sites to ensure that buildings and grounds are being fully utilised, and suitable for modern healthcare’. This is Ryhurst’s third such ‘whole estate’ joint-venture agreement with the NHS, and the first with a non-Foundation Trust, harnessing an approach that sees the company shoulder a considerable part of the burden of making optimum use of, and deriving ‘maximum value’ from, large healthcare estates. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Brett Seeney, BEng Hons, CEng, FIHEEM, MCIBSE, an associate at WSP in Melbourne reports, in an article first published in the IFHE Digest 2014, on a major redevelopment scheme at the Echuca Regional Health Hospital in Australia’s northern Victoria. The project innovatively harnessed the latest building services engineering technology to help the hospital operate more in a more sustainable and efficient way, while simultaneously improving comfort for patients, visitors, and staff.

In an article that first appeared in Canadian Healthcare Facilities, Peter Semchuk, a senior associate with IBI Group, explains how an innovative approach was taken to optimising indoor air quality and infection control during the construction of the recently completed Fort Saskatchewan and Strathcona Community Hospital in Canada.

Professor Mathew Bacon, MD of The Conclude Consultancy, argues that with healthcare facilities required to play a considerable part in helping the UK meet tough carbon reduction targets, a new approach to designing large acute hospitals is required that takes significantly greater account of such facilities’ ‘In-use’ energy consumption.

With the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa widely considered the worst to date, and British nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, who was diagnosed with the virus in December after returning from work in Sierra Leone, currently being cared for in a special isolation unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital, Jon Otter, scientific director of the Healthcare Division at Bioquell, considers prevention and control strategy for a disease which, by early January this year, had killed well over 8,000 people since the original outbreak just a year before.