RECENT NEWS

Brandon Medical has achieved a ‘Highly commended’ in the Building Better Healthcare Awards 2014. The company’s new operating theatre light, the Quasar eLite (HEJ – May 2014), was commended ‘for a unique set of features which vastly improve user experience over existing offerings’.

Figures recently released by Barbour ABI, ‘chosen provider’ of construction data to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Government, reveal that more than £81 billion worth of renewable energy projects are proposed by 2025, representing nearly half of all infrastructure spending in the UK.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has chosen to partner with Sodexo for its cleaning, portering, retail, and private patient services, across its five hospitals in London – Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital; Hammersmith Hospital; Charing Cross Hospital; St Mary’s Hospital, and the Western Eye Hospital

BSI has revised the PAS 5748 ‘Specification for the planning, application and measurement of cleanliness services in hospitals’.

Aluminium rainwater solutions specialist, Alutec, has re-launched its ‘increasingly popular’ roof outlet range.

A new venture from Capita plc will harness the healthcare expertise of three leading Capita businesses – its existing health advisory practice, its health insight business, and its health infrastructure practice.

The Central Sterilising Club (CSC) is keen to encourage all those with a professional interest in decontamination and infection prevention and control to join it, explains John Prendergast MIHEEM, decontamination engineer at NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership, and CSC committee member.

In ‘an inspiring curtain-raiser’ to ‘Tomorrow’s Engineers’ week last November, the Arkwright Scholarships Trust made its largest ever award of Scholarships to youngsters that it hoped would be ‘future leaders in the engineering profession’.

A UK waste company – Betts Envirometal (HEJ – September 2013) – has won the Best Financial Efficiency model award in the 2014 Building Better Healthcare Awards.

BSRIA says its new ‘Illustrated Guide to Hot and Cold Water Services’ (see also Water Systems feature and round-up, pages 61-66) complements its other ‘bestselling’ illustrated guides to mechanical and electrical building services and renewable technologies.

The Isle of Wight NHS Trust has signed ‘a ground-breaking strategic estates partnership agreement’ with Ryhurst, via which the latter will deliver ‘a wideranging estates strategy that supports the Trust in the delivery of excellent patient care’.

Bioquell’s 35% hydrogen peroxide vapour (HPV) system (photo shows the Bioquell Q-10 portable decontamination ‘suite’) for the decontamination of Ebola exposed environments has already been successfully used in the UK, the US, France, and the Netherlands, for disinfecting rooms or ambulances used to treat Ebola patients, the company reports.

When Karl Storz successfully bid to refit two integrated theatres at Colchester General Hospital, the team had just nine days to work on each theatre; in just over a fortnight, the hospital had two new OR1 NEO integrated theatres featuring ‘some of the most advanced technology of its kind in the world for carrying out minimally invasive surgery’.

The Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centre in Harrogate has officially been opened.

The Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Erica Kemp, has opened the city's new eye centre at Spire One Penny Lane.

Specialist in in door opening solutions, Assa Abloy, has supplied a range of products designed to mitigate patient risk to a new West Midlands mental health facility.

Building apartments above public buildings including hospitals, schools, and libraries, could provide room for 630,000 new homes in London, according to a report, Building Our Way Out of a Crisis, published by engineering services consulting specialist, WSP.

Biomass boiler specialist, Wood Energy, is introducing five new service and maintenance plans for its installations, and, in what it says may be a first, offering 20-year boiler warranties.

Specialist insulation distributor, Encon, has appointed Steve Moorhouse, a senior industrial/HVAC industry expert with over 30 years’ experience, as its new Yorkshire and North West business development manager for the industrial and HVAC sectors.

An award for an outstanding innovation in healthcare – the Limpet Drug Trolley Alarm – has been presented to a team of NHS staff at an event organised by Health Enterprise East.