FEATURE ARTICLES

The past few years have seen ever-increasing emphasis from the regulators, inspection bodies, and the Department of Health, on the cleanliness and general fitness-for-purpose of hospital wards and other patient care environments.

Last month’s HEJ saw editor, Jonathan Baillie, report on ‘the first half’ of a recent roundtable debate staged jointly in London by IHEEM and multidisciplinary engineering consultancy, Crofton Design.

Plans now well into implementation, to transfer ownership, this April, of the assets and buildings formerly owned by Primary Care Trusts on their abolition to a new limited company, NHS Property Services, have naturally aroused considerable interest across the healthcare estates community.

The range and choice of flooring now available for use in hospitals, care homes, GP’s surgeries, and other healthcare facilities, is now seemingly almost unlimited, as, it seems, are the creative and design possibilities given flooring manufacturers’ ability to incorporate not only a broad palette of different colours, but also a myriad of designs.

A recent webinar hosted by the Building & Engineering Services Association (B&ES) in partnership with IHEEM examined ‘the threat posed by dirty ductwork’ in hospitals and other healthcare facilities, with one of the key participants and organisers, Dr Ghasson Shabha, senior lecturer at Birmingham School of the Built Environment, arguing that such facilities are ‘struggling to contain airborne infections transmitted via poorly maintained ventilation and air conditioning systems’.

Harrowing television images of the evacuation of a number of New York hospitals during last October’s Hurricane Sandy will no doubt have prompted many estates managers to reconsider the adequacy and resilience of their emergency power supply.

In the first of a series of articles planned to run regularly in HEJ designed to provide healthcare engineers – and especially those operating at Technician level – with sound technical guidance on a key equipment or technology-related topic.

One of the most important challenges facing the UK healthcare estates community, particularly given the sector’s ageing profile, is how to attract new talent, especially, but not only, in terms of school, college, and university leavers, who may well never have considered healthcare engineering or estate management as a potential career.

‘The taxpayer is losing millions of pounds in poorly procured healthcare buildings due to the lack of construction expertise within the NHS Trusts; the Government urgently needs to redress this if the losses are not to spiral out of control’.

Valuable contributions, in some cases spanning a long and distinguished career, in a wide variety of different healthcare engineering and estates management disciplines, were recognised in style with the presentation of the 2012 IHEEM Awards at last October’s Healthcare Estates 2012 Annual IHEEM Dinner.

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.