FEATURE ARTICLES

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.

In the October 2014 issue of HEJ, Keith Hamer, group vice-president, Asset Management & Engineering at Sodexo, and marketing director at Asset Wisdom, Kevin Main, argued that the new ISO 55000 standards present facilities managers with an opportunity to create ‘a joined-up, whole lifecycle approach’ to managing and delivering value from assets. In this article, Kevin Main and Chris Bradley, who runs various asset management projects, examine the process of creating an asset management system.

Phil Wade, director of Marketing at Static Systems Group, looks back at how bedhead services and trunking have developed over the past 40 years. Their development has, he says, been driven not only by increasingly stringent infection control criteria, the need for more attractive aesthetics, increased functionality, evolving communications technology, and the ability to adapt to meet changing needs, but equally by the growing part that clinicians and healthcare planners now play in the decision-making process for bedside layouts. He also looks forward to what we might expect to see in the future.

The tragedy of a patient dying through suicide is something that healthcare services strive to prevent. Although staff caring for those admitted to mental healthcare facilities will generally be highly vigilant over their patients’ wellbeing and state-of-mind – which should greatly reduce the risk of self-harm or suicide – predicting and preventing fatalities among such inpatients can be ‘fraught with difficulty’.

‘One of the things I’ve noticed in my role over the past two years is that while we have seen improvements in ‘pockets’ of the country, we still have much work to do to enhance and improve the NHS estate in the community’. This was the opening salvo from Antek Lejk, executive director and partnering lead at Community Health Partnerships, in a presentation titled ‘Improving the primary and community estate: Better Quality, Better Value, Better Health’, given as part of the Planning, Design & Construction ‘stream’ at October’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates 2014 conference.

As the 2014/15 financial calendar reaches the mid-year assessment, the search for efficiency savings and cost improvement plans (within the healthcare sector) continues. So says leading global built asset consultancy, EC Harris. Here, basing his article on the company’s recently published fifth report, Conor Harris (pictured), the company’s global head of Health, argues that, ‘while pressure on Trusts to balance the books is greater than ever before’, and the ‘quick wins have been won’, there are still ‘major savings to be made’.

In this article, Dave Mortimer MIHEEM, national sales manager, Vapac, at Eaton-Williams, examines the importance of getting humidification levels right in all areas of hospitals and other healthcare facilities to maximise patient, staff, and visitor comfort and safety, and minimise the risk of infection transmission and spread. His experience is that, too often, the importance of installing new humidification equipment is overlooked, or that existing such equipment is switched off where it needs to operate, or simply not replaced when it breaks down.

Andrew Poplett, a highly experienced engineer with over 28 years’ experience in healthcare building services engineering, considers some of the key tenets of good fire safety practice in healthcare premises, noting that fire safety is a core element and consideration within CQC inspections, and under the NHS Premises Assurance Model (NHS PAM). He warns those responsible for fire safety against letting key elements ‘fall between the cracks’.

NHS estates managers are regularly told that only by having a clear picture of the condition of their existing estate can they develop an effective strategy for managing and getting the best out of it. At October’s Healthcare Estates 2014 conference, Peter Haggarty, strategic facilities director at Health Facilities Scotland (HFS), explained how the organisation had recently developed its own effective ‘strategic approach’ to asset management across Scottish healthcare facilities, working closely with facilities capital planning and management company, VFA.

A strong gathering of IHEEM members, senior representatives from London livery companies, construction companies, architects, consulting engineers, and equipment suppliers, a number attending on behalf of Company Affiliates, gathered in Westminster on the evening of 18 November to hear the Institute’s new President, Chris Northey, give his inaugural Presidential Address.

The healthcare sector is one of the toughest environments for any specifier. For washroom provision alone, the combined requirements of ensuring infection control, hot water safety, and optimised hygiene, while also providing ease of use and maintenance, can prove challenging. Chris Tranter, product manager at Bristan, lifts the lid on the latest technologies, and how they make lighter work of washroom safety in the healthcare sector.

Advocates of 100 per cent single-bedded hospital accommodation have long cited such accommodation’s benefits, particularly in terms of a quieter, more therapeutic recovery environment, with greater privacy and dignity, reduced cross-infection risk, and, for example, the ability to decontaminate patient spaces, when required, with less disruption to clinical care.

Creating a good physical environment for patients is a challenge for the NHS, with its wide variety of building styles and ages. However, even small changes can have a positive effect for both patients and staff.

Healthcare facilities often lead the way when it comes to investing in efficient and reliable heating technologies that can reduce energy costs and prevent breakdowns.

Technology is playing an ever more important role in the hospital environment in the drive to improve care standards and the patient experience. Nurse call systems have always played an important role, which is becoming more vital in light of the trend in the acute sector towards single bedded rooms.