FEATURE ARTICLES

Established in 1969 by the Department of Health as the National Centre for Hospital Engineering, Eastwood Park is today acknowledged as one of the UK’s leading providers of specialist technical, engineering, estates, and facilities management training to the healthcare sector.

In an article that first appeared in the June 2014 issue of Health Estate Journal’s sister publication, The Clinical Services Journal, the Copper Development Association highlights the growing recognition, both in the UK, and among healthcare research and provider bodies overseas, of the significant part that antimicrobial copper can play in preventing and controlling infection in healthcare settings.

This October will see the completion of a £42 million, two-phase construction project by main contractor, Medicinq Osborne, to deliver a new 86-bed adult acute inpatient mental health unit for Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (HPFT) at Kingsley Green near Radlett.

A new £6.4 million dual hybrid endovascular theatre suite at the Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI), which the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CMFT) says will ‘transform the treatment of patients undergoing minimally invasive vascular and cardiac procedures’, has recently come into operation. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered, when he met, a few weeks before its completion, with one of the vascular surgeons who championed it, and the Trust’s associate director for Surgical Services, who wrote the business case, the surgical suite makes the MRI the UK’s first hospital equipped with two adjacent full hybrid theatres utilising a robotic imaging system, with a fully flexible, synchronised operating table.

In our latest ‘technical guidance’ article, Richard Clarke, sales and marketing director at one of the UK’s leading lift and escalator specialists, Schindler, examines some of the key issues surrounding the specification, maintenance, and operation of lifts in hospitals to help ensure the highest standards of safety and reliability.

Matthew Bradford, editor of Canadian Healthcare Facilities magazine, reports on an expansion at an Ontario healthcare facility set to make it one of Canada’s largest acute care hospitals. In an article that first appeared in the Autumn 2013 issue of the official magazine of The Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society (CHES), he explains that, on its completion, the hospital will also be North America’s ‘first fully digital hospital equipped to such a high level’.

IHEEM’s recently established Architecture and Design of the Built Environment Technical Platform (ADBETP) is now firmly up and running, and, as one of its members, Gary Mortimer, general manager, Facilities & Estates, at NHS Grampian, puts it, is determined to bring tangible, positive, and sustainable benefits to the NHS built environment to support the effective delivery of changing clinical needs’. Equally, the Platform hopes its activities will ‘add value to IHEEM members, technical professionals in health construction and operational management, and other healthcare professionals working in NHS buildings’. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Currently, the NHS in England collectively spends over £633 million1 on energy alone annually. With 245 Trusts,2 that is an average of £2.6 million per Trust. There is no one ‘quick-fix’ solution; the NHS needs instead to think ‘outside the box’ to make manageable improvements to its estate, and free up hefty sums to drive back into patient care.

Salto Certificated Partner, Ambar Systems, has installed Salto’s online wireless XS4 security solution at the Antrim Area Hospital in Northern Ireland. XS4 currently secures 80 doors throughout a new emergency department, supplemented by 300 XS4 locker locks.

On 26 September 2015 the Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Directives for water heaters (Lot 2) come into force, meaning that water-heating products sold in the UK and other countries in the European Economic Area will need to meet minimum energy performance criteria in order to be legally placed on the market, and will require an energy label.

In HEJ’s May issue we reported on the first ‘half’ of a lively two-and-ahalf- hour roundtable discussion jointly staged by IHEEM and building and engineering services association, the B&ES, in London.

Sixteen months ago, according to Trumpf Medical Systems, which managed the project, ‘something out of the ordinary’ happened at Leighton Hospital in Crewe. When making plans to upgrade ageing operating theatres and critical care units, the estates department took the decision to involve other disciplines from the very start of the process.

A venturi-based system installed at Manchester’s ‘old’ Saint Mary’s Hospital, designed to ensure regular flow of cold potable water flow throughout pipework, prevent stagnation, maintain HTM 04-01-compliant water temperatures – thus helping to minimise growth of potentially harmful waterborne bacteria, and eliminate deadlegs.

Energy and utilities management specialist, Dalkia, boasts over 75 years’ experience within the healthcare sector. It has helped more than 100 hospitals throughout the UK to meet carbon reduction strategies and reduce costs.

With the safety and security of all hospital users paramount, the need to safeguard valuable equipment against theft, and NHS security breaches on the rise, can estates and facilities managers afford to compromise when it comes to security in healthcare facilities?

Three articles that featured in HEJ’s April and November 2013, and April 2014 issues, focused, respectively, on the roles and responsibilities of those operating and managing medical gas pipeline systems, the MGPS Permit to Work System, and how to raise and complete the MGPS Permit to Work.

In an article which first appeared in Canadian Healthcare Facilities, the monthly magazine of the Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society (CHES), Michelle O’Brodovich and Etienne deMuelenaere, of independent, ISO-certified, energy efficiency specialist, Ecosystem (which has offices across the US and Canada).

Dr Tom Makin, a highly experienced microbiologist and former Directorate manager at the Department of Medical Microbiology at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, and Ken Tench, compliance manager, Estates and Facilities Directorate, at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

As reported in last month’s HEJ, the new Sustainable Development Strategy for the Health, Public Health and Social Care System for 2014-20 rightly emphasises the importance of the built environment to health and well-being.

Hospitals and other healthcare facilities unprepared for the power cuts predicted by energy observers in the light of what they say are insufficient UK power reserves, and particularly electrical energy capacity, could face ‘catastrophic’ consequences, warns Bill Wright, head of Energy Solutions at the Electrical Contractors’ Association (ECA).