FEATURE ARTICLES

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.

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.