RECENT NEWS

David Frise, who has combined the roles of head of sustainability at the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) and CEO of construction fit-out body, FIS, for seven years, has been appointed as BESA’s new CEO.

NHS Property Services has raised ‘a record amount for reinvestment in the NHS’ by selling the vacant and surplus former St George’s Hospital site in Hornchurch, Essex for over £40 m to national housebuilder, Bellway.

Electrical and mechanical services provider, Quartz Electrical and Mechanical Services, installed a wireless Aid Call Touchsafe Pro nurse call system at Ramsay Health Care’s new Tees Valley Hospital, which opened this February.

Brand new primary care centres in Boyle, Tuam, Ballinrobe, Limerick, Claremorris (pictured), Ballymote, and Kilcock, have become the first to be completed as part of a ‘groundbreaking’ public-private partnership (PPP) to deliver 14 new primary care facilities across the Republic of Ireland.

MTX has successfully handed over a modular endoscopy decontamination facility to Colchester General Hospital.

Avensys UK says that it is ‘perfectly positioned’ to bring the benefits of the Apprenticeship Levy to the NHS, working with Trusts to train new and existing clinical and medical engineers and ‘address the lack of technical skills in the workplace’.

The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) have announced a joint initiative to explore the potential to develop a completely new form of contract explicitly for facilities management.

The new £35 million northern headquarters of the Royal College of Physicians will be known officially as The Spine, taking its name from a striking staircase on its north elevation.

Leading multi-disciplinary real estate consultancy, Virtus Consult, has been appointed by North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust to project manage the design and costing exercise for a new Data Centre at Hinchingbrooke Hospital.

It has been identified that the hospital’s main data centre lacks the capacity to meet the Trust’s future needs, with expansion necessary to allow the Trust to increase its use of technology in line with the its ambitious IT strategy.

Colin Dobbyne and the teams from Hexham General Hospital and the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) have received a prestigious award for Most Innovative Outreach Project at the recent Africa Healthcare Week 2018 Awards.

The award was given in recognition of the work done by the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to train surgeons in Tanzania in laparoscopic surgery via a televisual link developed and set up by Colin Dobbyne.

The Maggie’s Centre in Oldham has incorporated Allgood’s Holt ironmongery, including L- shaped lever handles, WC turns, coat hooks, doorstops, and toilet roll holders, as well as disabled toilet furniture, ‘to complete its thoughtful and hopeful design’

Allgood said: “Handcrafted from European oak, the Holt range seamlessly blends with the hardwood cross-laminated timber (CLT) building, and reduces the impact of neuropathy for the patients.”

The VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki are collaborating with industrial partners to investigate opportunities to extend integration of visually attractive solar modules into architecture of building façades.

VTT Technical Research Centre says it has developed a mass production method – based on printing technologies to manufacture patterned organic solar modules – that 'enables freely customised solar modules to meet the architectural requirements of buildings, and to add value to their visual appearance in addition to energy production’.

The updated BREEAM UK New Construction scheme has ‘gone live’, following BREEAM’s most comprehensive industry consultation to date.

The revision of ‘the world-leading sustainability assessment method for real estate’ addresses ‘key industry challenges’ around the performance gap, as well as lifecycle assessment, ‘offering benefits for developers, investors, and users’. It also adopts fresh approaches to sustainable travel and ecology to reflect evolving best practice.

In the past three months David Bailey Furniture Systems has won four contracts in Wales – ‘fairly new territory’ for it – for fitted healthcare furniture valued at almost £160,000.

As part of a £6.5m upgrade to maternity and neonatal services at Prince Charles Hospital in Mid Glamorgan, it will fit base and wall storage units, worktops, and drugs cupboards, in 60 different rooms.

Forty NHS hospitals and community services across England are to receive £760 million to modernise and transform their buildings and services in the year of the NHS’s 70th birthday.

The funding was announced on 28 March by Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt. The Department of Health says it is the biggest investment of its kind in the NHS in over 10 years, with the money to be spent on programmes to meet local demand, such as new urgent care centres and refurbishing mental health facilities.

Two staff at The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital will be studying for a Foundation Degree in Hospital Engineering this coming autumn.

Ben Huband, Electrical trainee technician, and Mark Stedman, Mechanical trainee technician, are undertaking the qualification through Staffordshire University and Eastwood Park Training.

Government, industry, system operators, and the engineering profession, must act together in a coordinated way to improve cyber safety and ensure that the Internet of Things develops in a secure and trusted way, say two new reports published by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) and the PETRAS Internet of Things research hub.

The reports, respectively Cyber safety and resilience: strengthening the digital systems that support the modern economy, and Internet of Things: realising the potential of a trusted smart world, together cover the Internet of Things and other digitally connected systems such as industrial control systems and building management systems.

Two staff at The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital will be studying for a Foundation Degree in Hospital Engineering this coming autumn.

Ben Huband, Electrical trainee technician, and Mark Stedman, Mechanical trainee technician, are undertaking the qualification through Staffordshire University and Eastwood Park Training. They are also completing an in-house trainee programme, facilitated by the Trust’s Estates Department, which outlines the core competencies required to be a hospital engineer.

As an established and accredited training provider to both the NHS and private sector, BOC Healthcare says it is ‘committed to empowering staff to understand and use medical gases safely’.

BAM Construction has started work under a ProCure22 contract for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust on a new children’s cardiac hybrid theatre and intra-operative MRI facility at Leeds Children’s Hospital, set to open in February 2019, which will create a dedicated environment for paediatric cardiac surgery and paediatric neurosurgery.