RECENT NEWS

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’.

The Water Management Society (WMS) has introduced a second module to its City & Guilds accredited training course, ‘HTM 04-01 Water Hygiene Training: Managing and Controlling the Risk of Waterborne Pathogens in Water Systems’.

Operating theatres at the new £12 million South Lakes Birth Centre maternity unit at Furness General Hospital, Barrow-in-Furness, are benefiting from critical care power systems and surgical equipment supplied by Bender UK.

Bender Medical IT power systems and uninterruptible power supplies provide protection and resilience within the maternity facility’s electrical infrastructure. The two operating theatres incorporate Bender hygienic touchscreen theatre control panels, clinical pendants, and the company’s new Merivaara Q-Flow LED surgical lights.

A Patient Safety Alert has been issued by NHS Improvement on ‘the risk of death and severe harm from failure to obtain and continue flow from oxygen cylinders’.

MGPS Services says it is ‘pleased to welcome aboard’ Simon Colley, who, as an estates officer previously at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, was Authorised Person for MGPS, HVAC, LV, and Lifts, and Responsible Person for Water.