FEATURE ARTICLES

Peter Rogers, chairman of the B&ES (Building and Engineering Services Association) Ductwork Group technical committee, reveals how crucial leakage testing is in hospitals because of the health risk posed to patients if ventilation systems do not achieve and maintain the required standards.

June Lancaster, a nurse by background, who has spent 35 years working within healthcare and facilities management companies, and now runs her own consultancy, Asset Wisdom, and Steve Goodchild, an engineer with over 40 years’ healthcare engineering experience, and a director at estates and facilities solutions consultancy, CPA, argue that better teamwork and communication between clinicians and estates and facilities professionals, and a greater understanding of each other’s roles, would contribute significantly to an even safer, more efficient, patient care environment.

HEJ reports on the major benefits seen at Basildon University Hospital in Essex through the installation of a sophisticated building energy management system, which also integrates features such as access control, security, and lighting control, and whose advantages are increasingly being experienced by an ever broader range of Trust users.

Aspergillus, a fungus whose spores are ubiquitous in the environment, and are normally found in air, can be a significant issue in healthcare premises, and especially in hospital ventilation systems.

Under the Presidency of Greg Markham, who took up the role two years ago this month, IHEEM has continued to significantly raise its profile among key opinion formers, strengthening its ties with influential bodies such as the Department of Health, the Sustainable Development Unit, The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, ProCure21+, and the Engineering Council, and with parliamentarians, senior civil servants, its international counterparts, and the architectural and construction supply chains.

According to Ian Hopkins, a director of ENER-G Combined Power – which has delivered more than 50 CHP-led energy services contracts within the healthcare sector, having, for the past 30 years, designed and manufactured CHP systems at its global headquarters and R&D centre in Salford – ‘the energy cost and carbon-saving benefits of combined heat and power are difficult to match where there is a large heating/cooling demand over extended periods’.

Kristen Guida, chair of directors and co-founder of Climate UK, a not-for-profit community interest company and a national network of 12 climate change partnerships in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, discusses improving resilience planning, to enable estates teams in hospitals and other healthcare facilities to be better prepared to deal with, and mitigate the effects of, flooding and other severe weather events.

As facilities managers take more responsibility for the hospital laundries, Murray Simpson, chief executive of the TSA (Textile Services Association), the trade association for the laundry, dry cleaning, and textile rental industries in the UK, highlights the major issues that need to be addressed – ranging from effective stock control, to making sure nurses’ uniforms are washed at sufficiently high temperatures to prevent them harbouring bacteria, to ensure that Government targets on hygiene and efficiency are met.

Traditionally, the patient experience within the NHS has been a secondary consideration to the requirements for effective and safe treatment. However, since the coalition Government made a commitment to improving patient experience and putting patients at the heart of everything the NHS does, the patient experience has moved up the agenda of many healthcare leaders and is no longer considered to be a luxury.

HEJ looks forward to some of the highlights at next month’s Healthcare Estates 2014 conference and exhibition in Manchester, set to be the year’s largest gathering of personnel from the UK healthcare engineering and estates management sector under one roof.

Jane Howarth, of the University of Bolton’s Institute for Materials Research and Innovation, describes a study involving three NHS Trusts in the north of England which examined the merits of a ‘more sustainable’ approach to air filtration in air-handling units.

Lee Vines, sales and marketing director at PKL Group, a leading supplier of temporary and permanent catering infrastructure, considers the challenges facing hospital caterers and estates managers in ensuring that catering equipment is kept up-to-date and fit-for-purpose

Christine Lawlor, the deputy radiopharmacy manager and a senior clinical technologist in nuclear medicine at Lincoln County Hospital, who has worked at the healthcare facility for over 10 years, reports on a scheme initiated last December which is seeing all recyclable waste removed from the radiopharmacy’s ‘offensive waste’ stream, in the process reducing costs, benefiting the environment, and contributing towards the sustainability goals of the NHS Carbon Reduction Strategy for England.

In last month’s HEJ first we ran the first of a two-part focus, by Carl Gardner, former editor of the Institution of Lighting Professionals’ Lighting Journal, on the issues surrounding lighting and the ageing population, which focused particularly on effective task lighting. In the second part of the article, the author considers the important psychological, physiological, and biological effects of lighting on older people – and how improved lighting design can benefit this group in a number of ways.

With trade association for the heating, ventilating, air-conditioning, and refrigeration sectors, the Building and Engineering Services Association (B&ES), having recently updated its ‘TR/19’ guidance document – dealing with the internal cleanliness of ventilation systems – Health Estate Journal (HEJ) asks Richard Norman (RN), chairman of the Association’s Ventilation Hygiene Group Branch, and MD of specialist ventilation cleaning services provider, Indepth Hygiene, about the changes, and why the revisions were needed.

With the onus on healthcare providers and their staff to protect patients against all elements of ‘avoidable harm’ perhaps never greater, Gwen Walker, a highly experienced infection prevention control nurse specialist, and David Williams, MD of Approved Air, who has 30 years’ experience in validation and verification of ventilation and ultraclean ventilation systems, examine changing requirements for, and trends in, operating theatre ventilation.

Devising a strategy to deliver safe water to thousands of outlets spread across numerous buildings is always going to be a challenge, so how do you navigate your way through a bewildering labyrinth of sometimes contradictory guidance documents?

George McDonagh, validation test engineer and University teacher for Decontamination Sciences at the University of Glasgow Dental Hospital and School, and Professor Andrew J Smith, Professor of Clinical Bacteriology, honorary consultant microbiologist, and lead microbiology consultant for Decontamination, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, at the same establishment, describe the instrument decontamination teaching being provided to dental students on the Bachelor of Dental Surgery module at the Dental Hospital and School.

Switching to LED lighting has, specialist supplier of such technology, Exled maintains, ‘proven to be one of the most significant cost-saving activities hospitals can undertake’.

Oil-free technology for the production of medical air is used in many medical gas systems around the world, and is a requirement of the standards in many places.