FEATURE ARTICLES

In recent years, London’s Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has undertaken a number of ward refurbishments aimed at meeting the future requirements of the hospital head on.

Alan Daniels, business development director of emergency lighting specialist, P4, describes the latest trends in, and requirements for, emergency lighting, a vital part of the building services footprint in hospitals and other healthcare premises.

Excellent standards of cleanliness are more important for healthcare facilities than in virtually every other type of building, and well-managed drainage systems play a crucial part in this. business and commercial, utilities, public sector, and facilities management clients.

Robert Snook, director and general manager of Portakabin Hire, offers some practical advice to, as he puts it, ‘help healthcare providers rapidly expand hospital facilities to reduce patient waiting times with no compromise on the quality of the accommodation’.

Last month over 100 service users moved into a new purpose-designed and built modern mental healthcare centre, The Redwoods Centre, near the ‘old’ Shelton Hospital on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, a new £46 million facility for adults with acute mental healthcare needs and organic (brain impairment) mental health conditions. It has been designed and built under ProCure21 by BAM Construction.

A recent IHEEM seminar on water hygiene and safety, ‘The Invisible Threat’, saw John Newbold, an HM specialist inspector at the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) with experience investigating Legionella cases and outbreaks, provide useful insight into how healthcare estates engineers and other ‘responsible’ personnel could ensure compliance with the law by properly ‘managing and controlling’ Legionella risk.

Susan Duffy, a director of commercial glazing specialist, Fendor, draws on the company’s many years’ experience in supplying window solutions for applications ranging from schools to high secure mental healthcare facilities to provide useful guidance on specifying the optimal glazing solution, with a particular focus on what specifiers in the mental healthcare sector should be seeking in terms of design, glass type, strength, robustness, damage resistance, and anti-ligature features.

Bristan claims to be the UK’s largest supplier of bathroom and kitchen taps, and the second largest of mixer showers. With the launch, early in July 2011, as part of a major re-branding exercise, of ‘a tailored collection’ of taps, showers, and accessories, for commercial and public sector applications that brought together its own products with those from Sirrus by Gummers, the company is now targeting healthcare more seriously than ever before.

Thirty-one years after its establishment in a small office in Wigan, independent life safety equipment manufacturer, C-TEC, has moved into a new 75,000 ft2 factory, ‘the size of three football pitches’, marking the start of what founder and MD, Andrew Foster, dubs ‘the next phase in our exciting development’.

As the new NHS landscape’s structures, policies, and future strategic direction, begin to come more into focus, and the hiatus caused by the Health and Social Care Act’s passage through the various parliamentary stages to become law, begins to quieten, ‘surviving and thriving in this emerging new world’ will be a major theme underpinning next month’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates 2012 annual conference and exhibition in Manchester.

Dr Claire Holman, Principal at ENVIRON, a global consultancy which works with clients ‘to manage their most challenging environmental and health and safety issues, and attain their sustainability goals’, considers the impacts on health of dust released during demolition work, and the measures that can be taken to mitigate them.

Phil Green, senior project engineer at independent building services company, Shepherd Engineering Services (SES), describes SES’s creation a new ‘state-of-the-art’, £4.5 million, high dependency unit (HDU) at The James Cook University Hospital, Middlesbrough.

Roger Humphreys, managing director of Charter Specialist Security, a specialist supplier of ’built-in’ roller shutters, argues that, with the ability to be effectively ‘integrated’ into the fabric of a building, and availability in a wide range of ‘exciting’ colours and finishes, modern security shutter systems are a world away from the ‘often ugly and purely functional’ designs many will immediately picture when they consider using such items to protect their properties and their contents against attack.

Alex Krasnic BEng MSc MIOA, senior acoustician at ZBP Acoustics, the acoustics division of consulting engineer, Zisman Bowyer & Partners, explores practical steps towards achieving ‘the quiet hospital’ without compromising other design elements, while also recognising that acoustic design features can sometimes be seen to conflict with certain healthcare protocols.

According to steam system specialist, Spirax Sarco, ‘condensate contains about a quarter of the energy of the steam from which it came – a significant amount of heat available to an energy centre’.

Speaking at a recent IHEEM seminar focusing on some of the key water hygiene and safety, and waterborne infection prevention issues, facing healthcare estates/ engineering personnel responsible for ‘large, complex’ water systems.

Next month’s Healthcare Estates conference and exhibition will see a new IHEEM President take up the reins, as Greg Markham, BEng (Hons) CEng FIHEEM MIET MBIFM, unusual in being one of very few private sector employees to have taken on the role (he is currently technical services director at G4S Integrated Services [UK]), succeeds Paul Kingsmore.

Hospitals and other healthcare facilities that do not regularly inspect, monitor, and, if necessary, clean, both their general ventilation ductwork and ‘often forgotten’ kitchen grease extract systems could not only be putting occupants’ health, and even lives, at risk, but could also face heavy financial penalties, significant damage to buildings, and even prosecution, a leading ductwork cleaning specialist has warned.

Getting new, and often heavy, medical equipment, such as MRI and CT scanners, into busy working hospitals, is often highly challenging – from a structural, mechanical, electrical, and logistical standpoint.

According to Stephen Lloyd, lead facilities management (FM) tutor at Gloucestershire-based training provider, Eastwood Park, ‘a combined 150 years’ invaluable estates experience has just disappeared from one hospital in the past month’, and, as many experienced healthcare estates personnel retire, and the sector struggles to attract replacements, the situation is being replicated in many hospitals UK-wide.