RECENT NEWS

Offsite construction specialist, the McAvoy Group, has appointed its first CEO and a new MD, further strengthening its management team, and says it has plans to double the size of its existing business by 2025.

Eugene Lynch (pictured left), the company’s managing director since 2007, has taken up the position of chief executive; he will lead the Group’s expansion into the residential sector, and spearhead the investment, development, and launch, of a new offsite housing factory.

Meanwhile Mark Lowry (right) has joined as MD, taking full responsibility for the existing business and the continued delivery of its strategic growth plan. He has over 30 years’ experience leading highly successful companies in the construction industry. He was formerly Group director of CRH, the world’s second largest building materials group, with 90,000 staff and sales of €26.8 billion, and, prior to that, managing director of Northstone, Northern Ireland’s largest building materials and construction group, which includes Farrans Construction.

UCL’s Bartlett Real Estate Institute (BREI) in London is launching a ‘unique’ MSc programme in Healthcare Facilities that will explore how the physical environment affects healthcare.

Glasgow-based camper-van conversion firm, Caledonian Campers, has undertaken what the designer and manufacturer of specialist thermostatic mixing valves, showers, and taps, dubs an ‘outstanding bespoke conversion’, to create a special ‘Show Van’, in which Horne Engineering can demonstrate its product range to hospital engineers and facilities management staff, infection prevention and specialist care staff, architects, consulting engineers, and FM providers.

A new report from the Committee on Climate Change (the CCC), 'Net Zero – The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming', published on 2 May, says the UK can end its contribution to global warming within 30 years ‘by setting an ambitious new target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050’

The UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) has delivered a framework for the UK construction and property industry ‘to transition’ new and existing buildings to becoming net zero carbon by 2050, to meet the ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Bender UK has signed an exclusive distributor agreement with Merivaara of Finland to supply operating tables to hospitals and healthcare facilities in the UK and the Republic Ireland.

Demonstrating that it is about ‘more than modular and offsite construction’, MTX has completed a refurbishment, remodelling, and extension, of the existing Resuscitation Department at Plymouth’s Derriford Hospital, creating a new ‘resus’ unit incorporating additional beds and state-of the art equipment, while adjacent clinical activity continued uninterrupted.

A ‘topping out’ ceremony has recently taken place to mark the structural completion of the new health centre in Dulwich.

The Mayor of Southwark, Cllr Catherine Rose, and Dulwich and West Norwood MP, Helen Hayes, joined the CCG’s director of Finance, Malcolm Hines, to ‘top out’ the new building. Each said a few words, emphasising how the development has been shaped by local people, and highlighting the hub’s central role in delivering ‘more joined-up and accessible’ health and wellbeing services in Dulwich and south Southwark.

Sir Andrew Dilnot has been appointed chair of the Oversight Board for the Health Foundation’s new Health and Social Care Sustainability Research Centre (SRC).

The SRC will fund and undertake research on the long-term demand and cost trends affecting health and social care in the UK, with the aim of improving the evidence base to inform policy. Working with a network of funded academic partners, it will produce robust research on the drivers of sustainability in health and social care and long-term projections of health needs, funding, and workforce.

A ‘ground-breaking’ new Innovation Centre aimed at the catering, cleaning, and FM sectors is to open its doors for business on 1 May in Peterborough.

A ‘collaboration’ between Oxford company, GreenTeck Global, ‘an innovator in alternative green technologies’, and commercial kitchen experts, CK Direct, the Centre is based at CK Direct’s factory and showroom just a mile off the A1 (M), and is unusual, Greenteck says, in featuring a fully fitted, fully operational commercial kitchen as its centrepiece, all under one bespoke, stainless steel roof, also fabricated ‘from scratch’ on the premises.

As part of a new centrally controlled vehicle security system, The North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) has recently updated the security of its premises at its Lancashire regional headquarters near Broughton in Preston using Nortech’s stainless steel bollards housing Nedap ANPR cameras.

The importance of good hand hygiene, the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, and the need to ‘reduce reservoirs of infection’ in the healthcare environment, are key points in a new, ‘highly informative and thought-provoking’ CPD presentation from specialist in temperature control for water systems, Horne Engineering.

Europe is seeing rapid growth in the market for ‘Smart Connected HVAC’ – heating, cooling or air conditioning systems connected to a network – usually the internet – enabling their performance to be monitored and analysed, research from consultancy, test, instruments and research organisation, BSRIA, reveals.

VINCI Construction UK has started work on a new 14,728 m2 specialist hospital facility in Birmingham, which will provide acute care to private patients in the region, as well as providing extra capacity and access to specialist facilities for NHS patients.

Imperial College London has opened its biggest new academic building in a generation, describing the £167 m Molecular Sciences Research Hub on the College’s White City Campus as ‘the UK’s most significant scientific development since the Francis Crick Institute, and the largest investment in a university building in 21st century London’.

A new playroom for children at West Middlesex University Hospital, funded with the support of the ‘local community to hospital’ charity CW+’s Sun and Stars Appeal, was officially opened on 10 April by the Mayor of Hounslow, Councillor Samia Chaudhary.

Young patients, their families, and staff, were central to the design process, with specialist indoor play manufacturer, Tigerplay – who CW+ commissioned for the project. There was a particular focus on traditional play such as cars, trucks, a playhouse, and kitchen toys.

The Sustainable Development Unit (SDU) has worked in collaboration with a Cross System Group, comprising key representatives of organisations across the health and care sector, to establish what it describes as ‘significant sustainability commitments’ on behalf of 10 Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs).

BSI, the business improvement company, has significantly revised the 2001 edition of the original British Standard for fire safety engineering, BS 7974, and has published a new version entitled BS 7974:2019 - Application of fire safety engineering principles to the design of buildings.

Medical Air Technology (MAT) has completed another successful theatre refurbishment, this time at the Countess of Chester Hospital. This 600-bed large district general hospital, operated by the Countess of Chester NHS Foundation Trust, serves patients from Western Cheshire, Ellesmere Port, Neston and North Wales.

Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, Baroness Nicola Blackwood, has announced up to £56 million in funding ‘for research into the biggest challenges facing public health’.