RECENT NEWS

AFL Architects has been appointed once more to the NHS Shared Business Services’ (SBS) Construction Consultancy framework as architects, lead consultants, and contract administrators.

With this appointment to all regional lots under the framework, the practice – which has UK offices in Manchester, Birmingham and London – can supply to NHS and public-sector clients nationwide. This provides a fully compliant route to market to access construction consultancy services.

A secure video messaging service that ‘connects parents with their child’s progress’ in NHS neonatal units is being introduced by NHS Trusts across the country.

The original idea for the vCreate App came from a parent of a child receiving specialist neonatal care at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow. Hospital staff were asked to consider video updates as a way of reassuring parents on the wellbeing of their baby at times when they were not able to be in the Neonatal Unit.

The management, design, operation, maintenance, and cleaning of a healthcare facility’s water systems and point-of-use services form the brief for the multi-disciplinary Water Safety Group that leads on safe water in today’s healthcare environment.

The Water Hygiene Centre, based in Charlbury in Oxfordshire, says that its open training courses are ‘designed specifically for the needs of Water Safety Group members – from those working in estates management, mechanical design, and hard and soft facilities management, to infection prevention and control specialists’.

Prime has secured planning permission for a £65million specialist hospital facility located on the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham campus, Birmingham, which it says will deliver high quality acute healthcare for private patients in the region, as well as providing additional capacity and specialist facilities for NHS patients.

A joint venture between University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust Foundation Trust (UHB) and HCA Healthcare UK (HCA UK), being developed by the specialist healthcare property company, the 14,728 m2 hospital will be equipped with the latest technology to provide ‘some of the most complex surgical and medical procedures’ in cancer, cardiology, neurology, hepatobiliary, urology, orthopaedics, and stem cell transplantation.

The Government must ‘stop approaching the NHS and social care as a liability to be managed, and instead look at it as investment that delivers a good return’.

However, ‘throwing money at the system’ will not on its own be sufficient if the UK’s health and care system is to be fit for the 21st century’. So says the Lord Darzi Review of Health and Care: Interim Report, a new report from independent ‘think tank’, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which considers the current ‘state and condition’ of the NHS, highlights those areas where the greatest improvements have been made in the past decade, and looks at where – for example in efforts to ‘join up’ health and social care, provide early access for cancer treatment to all, and afford sufficient levels of support to the mentally unwell – substantial improvements still need to be made

According to the CBRE, the global facilities management (FM) market will be worth USD 1 trillion by 2025 – ‘and that’s just that which is outsourced’.

Its prediction comes against the backdrop of the recent unveiling of ISO 41001, Facility management – Management systems – Requirements with guidance for use, ‘published to help FM teams achieve optimum efficiency’.

The Construction (Retention Deposit Schemes) Bill has just been published in time for its 2nd Reading on Friday (27 April 2018).

The Bill stipulates that, unless the monies are protected, any clause in a construction contract enabling the deduction of cash retentions will be invalid. Cash retentions will have to be safeguarded within a retention deposit scheme. The Bill will apply to the whole of the UK.

NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) has launched a new Construction Consultancy Services Framework, which it says is expected to save the public sector some £16 million over the next four years.

Enabling NHS and wider public sector organisations to access services such as quantity surveying, civil engineering, and architecture, it provides a fully compliant route for public sector purchasing teams to access a comprehensive range of construction consultancy services.

Andrew Taylor, the former locksmith employed by London’s Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, has been sentenced to six years imprisonment for defrauding the NHS of almost £600,000, in the first conviction secured by the NHS Counter Fraud Authority (NHSCFA) since its establishment as a new Special Health Authority last November.

Having heard that he abused his position to defraud his employer of £598,000, the jury unanimously found him guilty of Fraud by Abuse of Position, contrary to sections 1 and 4 of the Fraud Act 2006.

Mistley-based lift consultant, ilecs, has won a five-year contract from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to provide its Authorising Engineer Service for Lifts, extending its existing 11-year partnership with the Trust.

Devon Medical Turnkey Solutions has recently refurbished a ‘dated’ X-ray room at York Hospital prior to the installation of new diagnostic equipment.

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.