RECENT NEWS

The “call for papers” campaign for the conference at this October’s Healthcare Estates 2008 Conference & Exhibition, the leading event for the construction, development and maintenance of UK healthcare facilities, has now closed, and IHEEM reports that this year’s response has been “excellent”.

IHEEM’s 2008 AGM, taking place at the recently refurbished Royal Academy of Engineering at London’s No 3, Carlton House Terrace on 13 May, will see the appointment, as the Institute’s new president for the next two years, of Rob Smith, who is head of the Department of Health Gateway Reviews and director of the Department’s Estates and Facilities Division.

Two IHEEM “Resilience and Emergency Planning” seminars on 11 June in Birmingham and 18 June in London will highlight the Department of Health’s new Health Building Note (HBN) 00-07, one of the first of a new suite of HBNs, which provides specific guidance on developing NHS facilities resilient to a range of threats and hazards.

A Belfast health centre incorporating Technal architectural aluminium glazing systems has won its second architectural award.

At a time when estates and facilities managers are taking increasing responsibility for sensitive information, the Information Commissioner has strongly criticised Hounslow Primary Care Trust for non-compliance with the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act by “failing to respond adequately” to an individual’s request for information about his late father-in-law’s care in a nursing home.

Following a competition win in late 2007 against seven competitors from the UK, Germany, Holland, Italy, the Ukraine and the US, bdpgroupe6, an architectural practice with offices in London, Paris and Dublin that undertakes international healthcare commissions, has been appointed to design a 250-bed children’s hospital on a 10 hectare suite near Kiev in the Ukraine.

Council trading standards chiefs across the UK are launching a oneyear long nationwide project this month to identify inaccurate hospital weighing scales they say could put patients’ lives at risk.

Work has finished on what the facility’s designers, architects Race Cottam Associates, describe as a “cutting edge critical care unit” in Sheffield.

Bespoke, contemporary furniture designer and manufacturer Noble Russell has worked with London product and graphic designer Two Create to create the furniture for three relaxing, contemporarily-style rooms for young cancer patients at the Teenage Cancer Trust’s (TCT) Young Persons’ Cancer Unit (YPU) at Birmingham’s The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Clinical and biomedical engineers who feel a project has improved the day-today running of a department, or are particularly proud of a large procurement exercise, have until 6 May to enter an award scheme being launched this year by medical diagnostic and healthcare product manufacturer Welch Allyn.

A time capsule placed inside the walls of the former Lytham Hospital in 1928 containing coins and stamps from the 1920s, a newspaper, and the hospital’s Annual report, was recently found during the demolition of the hospital buildings to make room for the new Lytham Primary Care Centre.

Aura Corporation’s Actulite polarised daylight lighting

John Laing, a major sponsor and developer of privately-financed public sector infrastructure assets, has joined forces with one of northern England’s largest social enterprises,

Morgan Ashurst has started construction under a £16 m scheme to build four new primary care centres in Doncaster

Developer of purpose-designed primary care premises Primary Asset has handed over its first property in the Nottingham, area.

The Department of Health has awarded InHealth Molecular Imaging Solutions (IHMI) a PET/CT NHS diagnostic imaging service contract to deliver PET/CT services throughout the south of England, commencing this month.

Henderson Green, a south Coast-based building services engineering consultancy, is assisting in a pilot study to assess the environmental impact of new paediatric operating theatres being built at Southampton General Hospital.

The University of St Andrews is planning a new £45 m School of Medicine and Sciences which it says will not only lead collaborative research in areas such as cancer, health psychology and infectious diseases, but will also be one of the first UK medical schools with research facilities fully integrated with the other sciences and key university disciplines.

The British Lung Foundation and HSE’s current emphasis on “better education” for those dealing with asbestos is timely and “certainly relevant” as regards older healthcare buildings, a top asbestos consultant has said.

Tradespeople, and, it seems, builders and gasfitters particularly, are risking developing the incurable cancer mesothelioma and other serious lung diseases through ignorance about how to handle asbestos, the British Lung Foundation has warned.