FEATURE ARTICLES

Independent consultant to the healthcare sector Dr Melvyn Langford says a “fundamental flaw” in the way the long-established NHS “5 x 5” criticality grid used to assess the urgency of backlog maintenance has been interpreted could be giving NHS estates and facilities personnel, and in turn Trust boards, a distorted picture of the true risk being posed by the condition of key hospital buildings, plant, and equipment.

London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, renowned worldwide for the quality of its treatment for children and young people has, the NHS Trust which operates it acknowledges, “been battling for some time with buildings nearing the end of their useful life and in need of replacement”.

In a paper presented at the Institute of Hospital Engineering’s (IHEA) 2009 conference in Queensland, Phillip Carruthers, an associate director at Brisbane-based consulting engineers Norman Disney & Young (NDY), examines advances in heat rejection technology, and how they can be applied to air conditioning and refrigeration plant in healthcare and other facilities

It is recognised that hospital-acquired infection is a multi-faceted problem, and control of infection (CoI) can only be achieved via a combination of design and management factors, not by a single identifiable factor.

ELGA Process Water explains how it provided a new water purification system for the renal dialysis unit at the James Paget University Hospital in Great Yarmouth that not only delivers the required water quality, and meets Renal Association guidelines on water treatment plants, but will also help reduce the acute healthcare facility’s carbon footprint.

Ian Stone, business development manager at SHJ Pipelines, examines the arguments – logistical, practical and financial, for remote monitoring of medical gas pipelines, considering the advantages of such systems over “traditional” in-house monitoring from all these standpoints, as well as from the angles of patient safety and responsiveness. He also presents the case for retention of the “status quo”.

The potential pitfalls for health estates, board-level, and other senior healthcare personnel should proper health and safety and risk assessment procedures not be set out, followed, recorded, and regularly reviewed, and the legal ramifications of any failure of duty under legislation such as the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Corporate Manslaughter Act of 2007, were examined at a recent IHEEM risk seminar in London.

This year’s Healthcare Estates will be the first in the event’s history to be held at Manchester Central (formerly known as GMex), and, to give you even more reason to attend, we are pleased to be extending the “earlybird” discount deadline for conference registration to 17 September.

John Edwards, senior director, Global Healthcare Solutions, at Primex Wireless, discusses the challenges, solutions, and benefits, of implementing process automation and intelligent power management applications to help hospitals and other healthcare facilities save time, reduce costs, boost productivity, and ensure optimal regulatory compliance and patient safety.

Peter Sellars, the Department of Health’s deputy director of Gateway Reviews, Estates and Facilities Division, explains to HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie how and why the new NHS Premises Assurance Model (NHS PAM) was developed, and describes how recent piloting by several Trusts generated “extremely positive” feedback in advance of the Model’s wider roll-out.

With recent Association of British Insurers (ABI) fire loss figures reportedly showing “a picture of worsening public fire protection in the UK”, Tom Welland, fire services manager at fire safety consultancy Fireco, asks if, at a time of tough budgetary constraints, those responsible for fire safety in the health service are being encouraged to follow the principle of reducing risk to levels “as low as reasonably practicable” (ALARP)?

How the healthcare sector, and, in particular, the estates and facilities managers running healthcare facilities UK-wide, can “survive, strive and thrive” given an environment where real-term healthcare spending growth could fall below 1% over the next five years, was the main theme of the recent HefmA 2010 national conference in Harrogate.

Surgeons and clinical staff, theatre circulation and scrub personnel, and anaesthetists, as well as the estates and facilities team at Kent’s Maidstone Hospital, have worked with specialist supplier of integrated audio, video, and instrumentation systems for the operating room, Olympus Medical, to develop what is claimed is among the UK’s most advanced operating theatres yet built for laparoscopic and endoscopic surgery.

Undeterred by the current economic downturn, and determined to give its customers even better service and reduced order lead times via a more efficient manufacturing and distribution operation, Spirax Sarco, one of the UK’s leading steam engineering specialists, is investing £25 million in its Cheltenham manufacturing operations in a move which it explains will bring together onto one enlarged site its entire production, distribution, and R&D activities. Jonathan Baillie reports

Construction of the new 513-bed PFI-funded hospital in Pembury near Tunbridge Wells in Kent, a £227 million acute healthcare facility that, on its completion in the autumn of 2011, will be the UK’s first to offer 100% single-bed en suite accommodation, is ahead of schedule, “thanks to excellent teamwork and careful planning”.

Bruce Johnson, senior vice-president at the Houston, Texas offices of internationally-recognised HKS Architects, examines the considerable physical challenge of accommodating sizeable proton external beam radiation therapy equipment into hospitals, drawing on work undertaken by the practice to date in designing hospitals to cater for such sizeable machinery.

Minutes of the 43rd Annual General Meeting, held at the Royal Academy of Engineering, London, on Tuesday 11 May, 2010.

One of the key priorities identified by new IHEEM President Paul Kingsmore as the Institute goes forward is a more open approach to communicating with members. Very much in this vein, last month’s IHEEM AGM saw the chairmen of several key Institute committees report on some of their particular committees’ key achievements and activities over the previous 12 months. HEJ reports.

Secure and reliable power is critical for any hospital or healthcare building. However, according to global energy management specialist Schneider Electric, with the closure of electrical generation and nuclear plants becoming a real threat, there will be a reduction in the spare capacity of energy.

Richard Norman, managing director of ventilation system cleaning specialist Indepth Hygiene, discusses the importance of ensuring that such systems are properly cleaned in healthcare facilities, especially, he argues, as dust and debris on internal surfaces of ducting are potentially “ideal nutrients” for the growth of microorganisms such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile.