RECENT NEWS

A new report from the Sustainable Development Unit, Reducing the use of natural resources in health and social care, shows that local organisations across the health service in England are saving money by making more efficient use of resources, as well as benefiting the environment.

The Carbon and Energy Fund (CEF) is looking for NHS hospitals open to working with it to investigate the potential benefits of installing an ‘innovative total waste and waste water handling system designed specifically for healthcare’ by Dutch company, Pharmafilter, ‘at no extra capital or revenue cost’.

BES, one of the UK’s leading specialists in the design, construction, and validation of high specification pharmaceutical, life sciences, and healthcare facilities, is to establish a southern headquarters in Milton Keynes.

Visqueen – part of RPC bpi recycled products – has provided a waterproofing and gas protection solution to the new Rutherford Cancer Centre North East in Northumberland, ensuring that it meets all local planning conditions.

Rockfon acoustic ceilings have been installed in a new ‘state-of-the-art’ health assessment clinic, Preventicum, in Central London, that offers ‘bespoke, indepth health evaluation and diagnostics, including full-body scanning’.

Utilising the PIC Framework, healthcare property developer, Prime PLC, has appointed national building contractor, Speller Metcalfe, to build a £6 m GP ‘healthcare hub’ in the centre of Hereford.

Static Systems has successfully completed a site-wide fire alarm upgrade and new system installation at Wexham Park Hospital, a 588-bedded acute NHS hospital near Slough managed by Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust.

As well as the main hospital building, the site has a large Post Graduate building, ambulance station, and staff accommodation, while a new 9,300 m2 four-storey Emergency Assessment Centre (EAC), currently under construction, and scheduled for completion by late 2018, will bring the hospital’s emergency department, ambulatory care, and assessment units together under one roof.

The British Woodworking Federation (BWF) and BRE (the Building Research Establishment) have joined forces to raise awareness of the importance of fire doors, and to help advance standards in their design, manufacture and installation.

The BWF and BRE said: “Fire doors are the first line of defence against devastating fires, and when properly built, installed, and maintained, save lives and protect property. Despite this, fire doors across the UK are still badly fitted, non-compliant, left propped open or damaged and, as a result, could be putting millions of lives at stake.

While free cooling ‘has the potential to unlock year-round process cooling energy savings for industrial end-users’, ‘a combination of scepticism and a lack of awareness’ is limiting wider take-up.

This is the view set out in a new ‘E-Guide’ from ICS Cool Energy, ‘Free Cooling: Break Free From The Cost Of Process Cooling’, which is available to download free from the ICS Cool Energy website, and outlines ‘how free cooling can cut process cooling costs by up to 80% compared with a purely electro-mechanical system’, and can be applied to any industrial application with a water leaving temperature of 10°C or more.

Property maintenance provider, Horbury Property Services, based in Rotherham, has won a contract with Chesterfield Royal Hospital in Derbyshire to provide planned maintenance and refurbishment services.

The initial three-year contract, with the option to extend or a further two years, involves looking after properties across the hospital’s whole estate – ranging from carrying out small repairs to large refurbishment projects.

BES, one of the UK’s leading specialists in the design, construction, and validation of high specification pharmaceutical, life sciences, and healthcare facilities, is to establish a southern headquarters in Milton Keynes thanks to sustained high demand for its expertise in the biotech ‘golden triangle’.

The Rochdale-based company has developed what it describes as ‘a world-class client list’ over the past 15 years, with customers including Smith and Nephew, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GSK, and the NHS.

A new report from the Sustainable Development Unit, Reducing the use of natural resources in health and social care, shows that local organisations across the health service in England are saving money by making more efficient use of resources, as well as benefiting the environment.

The publication supports NHS figures that show at least £90 million is now being saved each year across the country compared with in 2014, through measures to become more efficient in the NHS use of natural resources. Furthermore, despite growing numbers of patients, the health and care system in England has, over the past decade:

The provision of advanced cancer treatment in the South of England has ‘passed a key milestone’, with the arrival last month of the region’s first high energy proton beam therapy system.

Ascom UK is deploying hundreds of its Myco smartphones to enable on-call doctors at the Royal Bolton Hospital to better care for seriously ill patients at night and over weekends.

Following its successful delivery last November of a fast-track modular Outpatients’ Department to Plymouth’s Derriford Hospital, MTX has won the contract to provide a modular Heart Clinic to the same site.

Courtney Thorne has opened a new sales office in Stockport, and has also welcomed two new team members as part of its continued expansion.

Energy efficiency is the most important credential when choosing a heat emitter, according to a recent poll of facilities managers.

Manufacturer of specialist biomedical test equipment, Rigel Medical, has shown its ‘continued commitment to expanding its global reach’ by opening a new service centre in Singapore that it says is the region’s first calibration, repair, and safety testing facility for such equipment.

Fire consultant, Colin Newman, has joined Gloucestershire based training centre, Eastwood Park.

STRIDE, the development joint venture between Health Innovation Partners (HIP) – a partnership between Community Solutions Partnership, the healthcare development subsidiary of Morgan Sindall, and Arcadis – and University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB), have received outline planning permission to develop a healthcare village, Outwoods, on surplus land adjacent to the Queen’s Hospital in Burton-on-Trent.