RECENT NEWS

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.

The University of Bedfordshire recently celebrated the opening of a new nursing simulation suite at its Luton campus.

The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) has revised and updated ‘the industry’s primary guidance document for kitchen ventilation design’.

Currie & Brown, a leading construction consultancy company, has been appointed to provide project management and quantity surveying services on an expected £136 million ‘pipeline of works’ across the London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust’s estate.

The latest advantages in lighting technologies and controls are addressed in the new edition of Lighting Commissioning Code L, from CIBSE and the Society of Light and Lighting.

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

The transaction, handled by Savills, is the largest single capital receipt for a surplus site achieved by NHS Property Services since its establishment in 2013, with the proceeds all to be fully and directly reinvested in the NHS estate.

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

The revision of what the BRE describes as ‘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.

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 initiative comes in the light of feedback from some BIFM members that existing forms of contract, developed primarily for use in construction or mechanical and electrical projects, did not meet all their needs. If findings from the project research uphold this, a new form of contract will be developed as part of the well-regarded NEC4 contract suite.

Over £2,000 has been raised by Courtney Thorne for the Bournemouth Hospital Charity to help the charity fund a new specialist MRI scanner.

Touching personal stories reveal why Courtney Thorne chose to fundraise for this charity.

IDEXX Water says it is committed to protecting public health through its ‘innovative technologies and simple-touse tests’, which it says ‘can identify microbiological contamination in water more quickly and more accurately than traditional methods’.