RECENT NEWS

The Healthcare Facilities Consortium’s 2010/2011 Annual Conference, at Manchester’s Old Trafford stadium from 7-8 March, will be themed “Doing more with less – fact or fiction? Reality or hype”.

Kier Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of construction, development and service group Kier Group plc, has acquired the entire issued share capital of Beco, a Totnes, Devon-headquartered designer and installer of renewable energy sources, from directors Nigel Brunton-Reed and Hilary White, and Finance South West Growth Fund Limited Partnership.

The Healthcare Cleaning Professionals Association (AHCP), which has over 700 existing members, has opened two new branches in Ireland.

Weighing equipment supplier Avery Weigh-Tronix says its equipment could help the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust save £100,000 per year on its clinical waste disposal.

VINCI Park has won a 30-year PFI contract to design, build, finance, and operate, a new multi-storey car park at East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust’s Lister Hospital site in Stevenage.

Royal Philips Electronics has installed an LED lighting and control system within the Premier Suite of The Yorkshire Clinic in Bingley, in the process “creating an ambience more akin to an upmarket hotel”. Rooms have also been equipped with Philips flat screen televisions.

The second sustainability report published by the DHL-operated NHS Supply Chain reveals that, in the past two years, it has cut, by 12%, its warehouse and transport carbon emissions, become the world’s first organisation to trial an 18-tonne hybrid vehicle, and, working with hospitals across the Bristol and Bath area, saved around 10,400 vehicle miles over the course of a year.

Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has called in Vanguard Healthcare to deploy two mobile units at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton as a “visiting hospital” to undertake additional patient procedures across a wide range of surgical disciplines.

Hampshire-based ISO 9001-2001 compliant Next Control Systems has appointed Michael Edwards to the new position of northern sales manager of its fast-expanding Tutela Medical Division.

Race Cottam Associates has helped win planning permission for a new threestorey healthcare development it says will “revolutionise” the laboratory services used by Sheffield’s healthcare network.

Following last year’s announcement that the HEVAR (heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigeration) show was evolving from a regional to a national show in 2011,

The Government’s Health and Social Care Bill, setting out measures – including the disbanding of England’s primary care Trusts and strategic health authorities – designed to “modernise the National Health Service and put patients at the heart of everything it does”, was published on 19 January.

IHEEM President Paul Kingsmore will give a personal view on the likely impact on the NHS estate of last year’s health White Paper as one of the highlights of a wide-ranging IHEEM-supported conference, “Healthcare Infrastructure 2011”, being staged by the Building Better Healthcare events team at Austin Court in Birmingham on 2 March.

At the IFHE’s 16 November Council meeting in Tokyo (see also story on page 6) Francesco Castella handed over the Presidency to Yasushi Nagasawa of Japan. The meeting saw 24 IFHE member countries report on their activities during the past two years.

IHEEM members are invited to apply for the position of chair of the Institute’s Education and Training Committee, which advises the Council on education and training policy and develops and implements educational and training initiatives.

This year’s annual Architects for Health (AfH) debate, taking place on 17 February at the Strangers’ Room at the Reform Club, in London’s Pall Mall, will see discussed the motion: “This house believes that architects know more about sustainability than engineers”.

With the Department of Health having published its revised HTM 07-01 technical memorandum on healthcare waste management last month, and the Environment Agency set to obtain new powers which IHEEM says “could entirely change” the enforcement landscape for waste management regulation by the year-end, the Institute is staging a further seminar on this key topic for estates and facilities professionals in Bristol next month.

Forty-five papers were presented in two separate streams at the recent IFHE International Congress in Tokyo, where the keynote address was give by a key World Health Organisation (WHO) figure with the daunting responsibility for a budget of $130 billion covering 1.8 billion people in 37 countries, IHEEM’s IFHE representative Andy Wavell reports.

Greg Markham FIHEEM, chair of IHEEM’s Membership Committee, a Chartered Engineer, and technical services director at G4S Integrated Services, will give a chief engineer’s view of the key risks related to hard facilities management services provision, while a Health and Safety Laboratory speaker will cover the legislative environment, at two IHEEM FM seminars being held In London and Leeds during April.

Alongside an expanded depth and breadth of content, this year’s Healthcare Estates IHEEM conference and exhibition (1-2 November at Manchester Central) will incorporate more conference sessions with what the organisers dub “a visionary element”, looking ahead at what estates and facilities personnel might expect in the future.