FEATURE ARTICLES

HTM and HBN documents have, for many years, been widely regarded by healthcare estates teams and architectural, engineering, and construction professionals, as an invaluable source of technical guidance – on topics ranging from room sizes to decontamination of medical instruments, and from fire safety to flooring.

A recent successful IHEEM Parliamentary Reception at the House of Commons saw around 45 guests from the healthcare estates management and engineering, architectural, and wider engineering sectors, plus representatives from academia, gather to network, hear presentations on some of the key issues facing professionals working in these areas within healthcare.

Today, UK healthcare providers are under increasing pressure to cut costs, improve quality of care, and meet the changing needs of patients. However, asks Arup’s Healthcare Business leader, UK, Middle East, and Africa, Stephen Pollard, are enough NHS Trusts using their estate effectively to overcome these new challenges?

Paul Moore, managing director of standby power specialist, Dieselec Thistle, explains the business-critical nature of standby power systems in a hospital setting, and the specification criteria that should be considered to ensure that the installation meets the needs of the building, and takes account of its surroundings.

Air-conditioning technology specialist, Weiss Klimatechnik, believes it has developed one of the world’s first systems for continuous monitoring, and, where necessary, adjustment of laminar air flow quality and purity during, rather than prior to, surgical procedures, a technology it believes could substantially reduce rates of post-operative wound infection.

High quality architecture and extensive stakeholder consultations have transformed the delivery of Laboratory Medicine within Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NHSFT), explains Tim Robinson, senior architect at Race Cottam Associates, the architects on a scheme that has seen laboratory services from across the city consolidated within one modern, spacious, well-lit, and well-equipped building that should provide an extremely positive, ‘future-proofed’ working environment for staff.

Ensuring that neighbourhood healthcare buildings are designed around the needs of patients and staff will contribute positively to the health and wellbeing of the local community, but design considerations for multi-use healthcare buildings are very different to those for a typical GPs’ surgery.

According to David Graham of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS), “the importance of the safe diagnosis and treatment of patients cannot be overstated – yet the role played by water quality in patient safety has sometimes been under-stated”.

Vanguard Healthcare’s fleet of mobile surgical facilities has been deployed to healthcare sites throughout Europe and beyond for over a decade, providing vital additional clinical capacity when existing buildings are refurbished or upgraded, in the event of flood or fire, or simply to help hospitals cater for rising demand.

Mike Kwok, senior vice-president of Professional Services at provider of integrated software and services for facilities asset management, facilities capital planning, and capital spend management, VFA, discusses how healthcare organisations can more effectively plan and prioritise capital improvements, improve asset utilisation, and obtain much-needed funding.

The Health and Social Care Act’s potential implications for the healthcare estates community, how the NHS and private sectors can better collaborate to get the most of out of their built and other assets, how estates professionals can shape and inform future guidance, and the role of the new NHS Property Services Company (NHS PropCo), were among the hot topics addressed at this year’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates conference in Manchester.

Australia has two pioneering hospital projects nearing completion – the Gold Coast University Hospital in Queensland, and the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth. Both of these demonstrate how a patient-centred philosophy can be applied to large-scale healthcare developments.

In an article first published in the September 2012 edition of The Australian Hospital Engineer, Carl Sachs, managing director of falls prevention specialist, Workplace Access & Safety, explains how and why ‘the most popular safety-related Australian Standard of all time’, AS1657, was recently revised and put out for consultation.

John Prendergast, a Decontamination Engineer working within the specialist team at NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership /Facilities Services, and Wayne Spencer, an independent consultant on decontamination and healthcare engineering issues, with high-level previous experience at the Department of Health and the Welsh Health Common Services Authority (now NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership), report on a recent study day held in Birmingham, and staged by The Central Sterilising Club, entitled ‘Update on Decontamination Standards’.

Steve Mount, an independent Legionella management consultant and trainer with over 25 years’ previous experience in microbiology and UKAS-accredited Legionella analysis, underlines the rising number of nosocomial cases of Legionnaires’ disease in recent years, and explains the key risk assessment, management, and monitoring steps that must be taken by those responsible for hospital water systems to comply with legislation governing the ‘control and management’ of Legionella risk.

Conor Ellis, sector head, Health UK, at built asset consultancy, EC Harris, discusses how NHS Trusts in England can adopt an estates strategy that not only sees available space optimally matched with future clinical need, but equally, to secure maximum ‘value’ from their existing estate, sees under-utilised, ageing, or simply no longer serviceable buildings, sold, or developed for ‘alternative use’.

Graham McCorkindale, who heads the Health and Wellbeing strand at multi-disciplinary architecture, town planning, interior design, and landscape architecture practice, Keppie Design, examines how architects can best support the NHS at a time of major change by refocusing design skills hitherto focused on creating new healthcare facilities on the need to work within the existing estate – ‘maximising utilisation and getting best value from any available spend’.

It is not often, according to HLM Architects, that that a hospital project is used as a catalyst for an area’s social regeneration. As the practice itself puts it: ‘Regeneration tends to rely on creating a sense of pride and local identity, qualities with which hospitals are rarely associated’.

While MRSA rates in England continue to fall, NHS Trusts are looking for smarter ways to achieve further reductions in infection rates, or to support their ‘zero-tolerance approaches’, and, according to the Copper Development Association (CDA), the not-for-profit, membership-based organisation which supports and promotes ‘the correct and efficient use of copper and its alloys’, deployment of antimicrobial copper touch surfaces is being adopted in many hospitals and other healthcare facilities worldwide as ‘an additional and cost-effective infection control measure’.

Paul Franklin, who heads up the Technical team at Bedford-based specialist testing and defect analysis company, RAM Consultancy, explains how healthcare building owners and occupiers such as NHS Trusts, and their estates and facilities teams, can best manage, maintain, and, when necessary, refurbish, their building envelope and roofs, in the process gaining some perhaps unexpected benefits.