FEATURE ARTICLES

In an article in the May 2011 issue of Health Estate Journal, Debbie Hobbs, principal at environmental consultancy, Environ, explained the steps that organisations obligated under the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme needed to take over the following 3-4 years, and set out a checklist of actions to help.

Hospital estates teams are no strangers to ensuring that they have a ready supply of diesel stored on site ready to fuel standby generators in the event of a power outage.

Making healthcare provision more sustainable against a backdrop where ‘even the sceptics are admitting the Earth will face cataclysmic change if the economy and environment are not re-aligned’, maintaining safe, sustainable care environments while experiencing ‘a reform programme so big that you can see it from space’.

Next year will see the completion of a 10-year new build and redevelopment project to create central Norway’s largest regional hospital, in Trondheim, providing medical services for over 200,000 local people, and a further 450,000 inhabitants from the wider region.

In an article that first appeared in the The Australian Hospital Engineer, the monthly magazine of the Institute of Hospital Engineering Australia, Arup’s Dr Gerard Healey examines the design and construction of a new intensive care unit (ICU) at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital in Victoria, Australia.

Opened to the public last September, the Houghton-le-Spring Primary Care Centre in Sunderland, designed by P+HS Architects in conjunction with NHS South of Tyne & Wear for use by the Sunderland Teaching Primary Care Trust, was the UK’s first ever large healthcare building to achieve a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating at the final stage – for best practice in sustainable design and environmental performance for buildings.

Sarah Waller CBE, RGN, FRSA, programme director at The King’s Fund’s Enhancing the Healing Environment (EHE) programme, examines the work undertaken to date, and still ongoing, to improve the care environment for people living with dementia.

With energy efficiency and carbon reduction, and the importance of a relaxing, therapeutic patient environment, ever more in the spotlight, LED lighting’s proponents claim the technology offers healthcare estates personnel many of the answers on both fronts.

Last September Andrew Lansley claimed that some NHS Trusts occupying PFI healthcare facilities had been ‘landed with deals they could not afford’, seemingly attributing much of the blame for a scenario where the Department of Health said 22 Trusts in England alone could be at significant financial risk to Labour.

Chilled beam and fan coil-based air conditioning systems are both well-established means of effectively controlling the temperature, comfort, and air purity of the internal environment.

‘Estates as the enabler’ was the title of an interesting debate session on the morning of the second day of November’s Healthcare Estates conference, in which participants focussed on what part healthcare buildings and other ‘built assets’ would play in a future UK care landscape potentially quite different from that of today.

Birmingham’s City Hospital’s new maternity unit is an inspiring departure from conventional units. Contemporary design and the latest technology combine to give mothers a safe, yet relaxed, environment in which to give birth. HEJ reports.

With the opening of a new £1.4 m training facility at its Charlton House head office site in Cheltenham, steam system specialist, Spirax Sarco, believes it is now in a better position than at any time in its history to offer specialist steam system training that will enable those operating and maintaining such equipment in environments such as hospital plant rooms to optimise its performance and efficiency, cut their energy bills and carbon footprint, and ensure the safety of their staff.

HEJ reports on the Wandsworth’s Group’s recent installation of a new Internet Protocol-based nurse call system at the PFI-funded and built Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.

With surgical advances seeing hospitals and other healthcare facilities now undertaking an ever wide range of procedures, increasing emphasis is now being placed on the quality of the lighting installed in operating theatres, where ‘older’ technologies like halogen and xenon gas discharge are increasingly being superseded by LED.

The contribution made by individual healthcare estates and engineering personnel both to the specialist field, and to helping to educate, develop, and encourage, their peers and colleagues, was recognised in style during November’s Healthcare Estates event in Manchester.

How the lessons learned from a concerted Marks & Spencer sustainability drive that was established, and subsequently enthusiastically championed by, the retailer’s then CEO and chairman, Sir Stuart Rose, could be translated to an NHS under fierce pressure to cut its own carbon footprint, was the subject of a morning keynote session at November’s Healthcare Estates 2011 conference in Manchester.

IHEEM’s President, Paul Kingsmore, took the opportunity of his keynote address at November’s Healthcare Estates conference in Manchester to highlight some of the key changes in healthcare commissioning and delivery expected to result from the radical proposals set out in the Health and Social Care Bill, and to give his personal viewpoint on the implications for UK healthcare engineering and estate management personnel.

Healthcare technology specialist, The Wandsworth Group, has been awarded a contract worth over £1 million to design, manufacture, and install the state-of-the art nurse call system for the £430 million Bristol Southmead Hospital PFI scheme.

Many HEJ readers will first see this issue as they pick up a copy at Healthcare Estates 2011, IHEEM’s flagship conference and exhibition in Manchester.