RECENT NEWS

The £21 million phase one extension to the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, has been completed and officially opened. Designed by P+HS Architects, it is the first project in the country to come under the national roll out of ProCure21, the NHS’s framework agreement for the delivery of new capital-funded health schemes.

The architects’ practice RyderHKS has been appointed by Morrison Construction to design the new St Andrews Community Hospital being procured under a £25 million public private partnership (PPP) scheme for NHS Fife.

GreenValet, an independent supplier of cleaning disposables and information systems for facilities managers, has announced an agreement with NHS Supply Chain to distribute biohazard spill kits.

BMI Healthcare, has agreed a 12-year contract with Vanguard AG for its 49 private hospitals in the UK.

The largest primary healthcare centre in Britain, the £30 million Aldershot Centre for Health, has been topped out with a final trowel-full of concrete by Professor Jonathan Montgomery, chair of Hampshire Primary Care Trust.

Maris Interiors LLP is to create a 30-bed unit within the London Independent Hospital in Stepney, London, for InCROM (International Clinical Research Organisation for Medicine). The space, which will take 10 weeks to create, will be used by InCROM to conduct stage one clinical trials on volunteers.

The Manchester office of White Young Green (WYG), consultants to the built, natural and social environment, has returned to Aintree Hospital, Liverpool to undertake its second project in two years.

High-speed internet is no longer a luxury for the technologically savvy and is fast becoming a necessity for qualified and student health workers. An essential tool in aiding study and research, internet based technologies can offer a vital connection for overseas workers to their homeland and families, and a data networked infrastructure can even provide digital TV services.

Norwich and London-based LSI Architects has won the design competition for the new Palliative Care East Centre to be built on the James Paget University Hospital (JPUH) site near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The concept for the new facility, which is intended for completion within three years, was selected above designs from five other short-listed architects as presenting an “outstanding vision” for the project.

The first of a series of new nationwide surgical instrument decontamination “super centres” has opened in Kings Norton, Birmingham.

Sustainability and energy saving were the focus of two IHEEM seminars held in London immediately prior to the Institute’s AGM. James Verrinder reports.

Minutes of the 40th Annual General Meeting held at the Institute of Physics, 76 Portland Place, London, on Tuesday 15 May 2007.

The Institute of Healthcare Engineering and Estate Management would like to congratulate the following who had IHEEM grades recently awarded:

Hilditch, the medical equipment auction specialist, has become a company affiliate of IHEEM.

IHEEM’s London Branch is organising a trip to Mercedes-Benz World and the Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey on 13 June.

Delegates attending this year’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates Conference in Harrogate (16 and 17 October), will be presented with a particularly fine line-up of papers.

Offsite 2007, to be held at BRE in Watford on June 11–14, will explore how modern construction and advanced technologies are coming together to deliver higher performing, more sustainable and smarter buildings.

Documentation creation company SRC has won a European public tender to roll-out a Trust-wide digital dictation and workflow management solution to Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

A new partnership between NHS Direct and the Clinical Knowledge Summaries Service (CKS) will allow GPs and other healthcare professionals to access to patient information from their computers.

A continuous geared hinge/ concealed door closer combination has been used to create a safer, more comfortable environment in a specialist mother and baby unit at St Luke’s hospital in Middlesbrough.