RECENT NEWS

Vanguard Healthcare, ‘popularly known as the world’s leading provider of pop-up hospitals’, will showcase ‘international best practice’.

A panel discussion at the Electrical Contractors’ Association’s (ECA) entitled ‘Surviving the Recovery’ saw firm agreement that ‘the industry must modernise to survive and grow’.

Chaired by Peter Hansford, the Government’s Chief Construction Advisor, the panel included Brian Berry, chief executive of the Federation of Master Builders; Martin Bailey, chief innovation officer at NG Bailey; John Mead, partner at Gardiner and Theobald, Noble Francis, Construction Products Association economics director, and Paul Reeve, ECA director of Business Services.

Pegler Yorkshire’s new ‘online selector tool’, INSIGHT, provides installers and contractors with ‘a way to identify the most effective method to join pipework in any given situation’ via three ‘simple stages of search and selection’ – confirming the project type, application, and pipework system.

Spirax Sarco has delivered a project to provide the steam for heating, hot water, humidification, and laundry services, at the New South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.

Building contractors, Lindrick Construction, have begun the refurbishment of a Victorian house with the iconic Liverpool address, One Penny Lane, to create a 900 ft2 medical facility with treatment and consulting rooms for Spire Liverpool Hospital.

Prater has secured a roofing and cladding contract for the new £240 m Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, which is scheduled to open in the summer of 2015, at which point the existing buildings will be demolished and replaced with parkland.

Warning that corrosion of pipework and components in water-based heating systems ‘nearly always results in costly repairs and unwelcome disruption’.

The ISS Facility Services Healthcare catering service at The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust has achieved the Soil Association’s Food for Life Bronze Standard Award – the first time a contract caterer has achieved this important accreditation in the NHS – and is now looking to progress to the Silver standard.

Eastwood Park is to run an engineers’ apprentice ‘summer school’ in August, offering four days’ residential training for hospital engineering apprenticeships.

Wandsworth Healthcare, the specialist provider of nurse call systems, has appointed Stuart Guest, who has 25 years’ experience in developing and delivering nurse call and communications solutions to large hospitals, as national framework manager.

Acting on behalf of the Watkin Jones Group, the Healthcare team at Jones Lang LaSalle has successfully forward funded a modern, purpose-built health centre in Chester city centre for a total consideration of £18.5 million with Primary Health Properties (PHP).

Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital has ‘significantly improved’ the efficiency of its new low pressure hot water heating system by installing 30 BoilerMagXT units from Eclipse Magnetics.

Two years since its launch, the UK’s Fire Door Inspection Scheme (FDIS) has more than 400 candidates registered on its online training programme, while over 150 ‘fire door experts’ have passed the FDIS Diploma, and are using the designation, DipFD.

Downing College Cambridge (pictured) will be the venue for a three-day crossdisciplinary course aimed at clinicians, designers, project and facility managers, planners, architects, and engineers, ‘with an interest in the latest concepts and ideas that will contribute to the design of an emergency department that meets contemporary and future needs’, being held from 7-9 July.

A new range of room controllers, the SE8000 Series from Schneider Electric, integrate a thermostat/temperature sensor and programmable room controller in a single unit.

International ‘total facilities management service provider’, OCS, has invested in international FM consultancy, Agents4RM, with the aim of establishing a global professional services business for the FM and built environment sector.

Clifton Hospital in St Annes, Lancashire, has signed an agreement with EuroSite Power for the provision of ‘clean’ electricity, heat, and hot water from a CHP system, ‘provided at zero capital outlay to the NHS Trust, but affording lower energy bills for 15 years’.

BOC Healthcare, reportedly the UK’s largest medical gases business, has made its first delivery of compressed medical gas to NHS hospitals in Scotland (to the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary), marking the start of its new contract to supply medical gases to over 330 customers, from Shetland down to the Scottish Borders.

With, as Mark Jones, director of Learning and Development at Atkins puts it, ‘the UK not generating enough new engineers’, 3 March saw the official launch of the ‘EngTechNow’ campaign, which aims ‘to increase the status of Engineering Technicians’, and is targeting registration of 100,000 such technicians by 2020.

A workshop on steam sterilisation of dental instruments at the University of Glasgow Dental School covered subjects ranging from recent steam sterilisation changes in Scotland, to how transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents can be inactivated by steam, writes IHEEM in instrument decontamination and validation engineer at the School, and the event’s organiser.