FEATURE ARTICLES

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.

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.