One of the most important challenges facing the UK healthcare estates community, particularly given the sector’s ageing profile, is how to attract new talent, especially, but not only, in terms of school, college, and university leavers, who may well never have considered healthcare engineering or estate management as a potential career.
HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, met recently with Chris James, estates operational services centre manager at Southampton General Hospital, a champion of apprenticeships who first entered the estates world at the hospital 32 years ago, aged 16, in just such a role, and has made considerable efforts to continue to recruit apprentice engineers to his team over the past decade.
Working within the Estates Operational Maintenance Department, itself part of the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust’s Department of Estates and Capital Development, Chris James heads up an estates maintenance team with overall responsibility for estates assets valued at some £273 million. Southampton General Hospital is indeed one of England’s largest NHS acute hospitals, occupying a gross internal area of over 201,400 m2 on some 19.6 hectares of land, has over 11,242 rooms and ‘other spaces’, and around 1,050 beds. Unsurprisingly, the plant and equipment needed to keep such a large healthcare facility running efficiently is correspondingly substantial, with, for instance, a heated volume of buildings of some 529,000 m3 (based on 2011/2012 data). In the same year, the Trust’s estate consumed 35,725 MWh of electricity, at a cost of £2.9 m, while annual gas consumption was 69.382 MWh.
Lightening the burden
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