FEATURE ARTICLES

Ken Marriott, an independent acoustics consultant with Industrial Commercial & Technical Consultants (ICTC), outlines some of the key acoustics considerations for those planning new hospital build or refurbishment schemes, cautioning that, all too often, this important area is not properly considered at a sufficiently early project stage.

Allan Kelly, facilities director at Guelph General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, and chairman of the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society (CHES), describes how an independent water conservation assessment undertaken at the healthcare facility, and the subsequent remedial measures taken, resulted in substantial savings – both in reduced water consumption, and lower costs.

Health Estate Journal’s November 2010 issue included a fascinating personal account by Alan Bavis, facilities and engineering manager at New Zealand’s Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB), of how he and his team kept essential hospital services going in Christchurch after an earthquake measuring 7.1 magnitude on the Richter Scale hit the country’s South Island on 4 September that year.

IHEEM’s recent seminar in Birmingham, ‘Dirty Little Secrets’, not only focused on the key priorities for keeping surgical instruments clean and sterile (HEJ – April 2012), but also featured a timely presentation by Dr Jimmy Walker, principal investigator, Decontamination, HPA Microbiology Services, at the Health Protection Agency, in which the highly experienced microbiologist shared his expertise on what appears to be becoming an increasingly prevalent problem for healthcare estates and engineering personnel.

Europe’s newest hospital, and the UK’s largest ever PPP-funded and operated healthcare facility – the £650 million Royal London in Whitechapel – opened its doors on 1 March – following years of hard work and planning which has seen doctors and nurses involved throughout, working under the guidance of a 30-strong Barts and the London NHS Trust New Hospitals Programme team to create an optimal healing environment.

The 15th Annual Conference and Exhibition to be hosted by the Health Estates and Facilities Management Association (HefmA), this year themed ‘Strong Foundations or Shifting Sands?’, takes places later this month (24-25 May) in Telforda

Tabloid sensationalism aside, the increase in attacks on health service workers has led to many hospitals and healthcare facilities re-assessing their security systems.

According to many published studies, ‘ducting in ventilation and air-conditioning are largely overlooked and ignored, as they are out of sight and out of mind’, despite mounting evidence indicating a higher risk in spreading airborne infections’.1-6

A ‘bury your head in the sand’ approach to resilience planning is simply not an option for today’s healthcare estates managers, according to Billy Durie, contingency planning sector manager at Aggreko, a global specialist in temporary power and temperature control solutions.

IP systems expert, Terry Boarer, from healthcare technology specialist, Wandsworth Group, explains the capabilities of IP-based technology, what that means for the healthcare sector, and what health estates managers should consider when reviewing IP-based nurse call systems for specification.

One of the most complex multi-phase construction projects I have ever worked on’, is how main contractor Mansell’s Neil Rowlands, project manager on a £17 million project to re-build and extend the Accident & Emergency Department and Fracture Clinic at Essex’s busy Basildon University Hospital, describes the now almost completed ProCure21 scheme.

Steve Kearney, business manager for Newey & Eyre – Energy Saving 24/7, a team of ‘energy experts’ established early last year within one of the UK’s leading distributors of electrical supplies, discusses the technologies and simple measures now available to reduce emissions and cut wastage generated by lighting in healthcare facilities, at a time when the NHS, especially, is under increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint.

Established in 2004 by three ambitious individuals at the time involved in supplying windows and building plastics to the trade, Britplas Commercial has doubled its turnover year-on-year over the past three years, largely thanks to the success of its patented anti-ligature window, the Safevent, which it initially designed specifically for the Mersey Care NHS Trust’s new multi-million pound low secure mental health unit at Liverpool’s Rathbone Hospital.

‘Dirty Little Secrets’ was the title of a well-attended IHEEM seminar held in Birmingham in mid-February which considered some of the key challenges and obligations for those in hospitals and other healthcare facilities responsible for keeping surgical instruments clean, sterile, and fit-for-purpose, and, in the process, minimising risk of injury or surgical site infection to patients undergoing a wide range of procedures. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

The ‘new generation’ of modular wiring systems from Apex Wiring Solutions have been specified for two of the world’s foremost teaching hospitals – the Royal London and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, as part of a £1 billion redevelopment project, to cut electrical installation times, reduce on-site waste, and provide a pre-wired, factory-tested, power and lighting system. HEJ reports.

A year-long Department of Healthcommissioned, Design Council-run project, during which designers extensively observed patients and staff in A&E departments to identify what typically caused ‘flare-ups’ leading to aggression or violence, has concluded that the key to avoidance is ‘to give patients a better understanding of the system they are in’.

Two independently conducted surveys on sustainability – one into the ‘views and values’ of NHS ‘leaders’, and the other questioning the public about the importance of the ‘green agenda’ in the NHS, and their opinions on how the service might most effectively reduce its carbon footprint, form the basis of Sustainability in the NHS: Health Check 2012, a new NHS Sustainable Development Unit (NHS SDU) publication.

A new CHP-based Energy Centre completed in 2010 at London’s King’s College Hospital helped the south London facility cut its overall carbon emissions by 12% in the first financial year of operation, and reduce by £254,000 its energy costs over the same period, reports HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie.

Last December one acute hospital in south Wales, the University Hospital Llandough near Cardiff, was forced to cancel eight operations, with 81 patients affected in total, after thieves stole copper cabling from a back-up generator.

Although LED lighting has its critics, a number of whom (see article ‘LED – panacea or marketing hype’, HEJ – February 2012) are concerned about what they claim are some manufacturers’ ‘exaggerated claims’ about lighting efficiency and lamp lifetime, Philips Lighting believes that, such are the advances being made in this innovative lighting technology, that LED’s overall share of the European lighting market will have risen from around 7% in 2008 to 25% by 2020 and that, a decade later, it will account for a remarkable 75% of lighting sales.