Water wastage reduced and costs cut

Paul Gardiner, renal business development manager at Veolia Water Technologies, explains how one of the company’s reverse osmosis (RO) wastewater recovery systems has significantly improved the overall ‘sustainability’ of a renal water system at a Kent acute hospital, and, as result, has also reduced the facility’s water consumption and cut costs.

The Canterbury Renal Unit at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital in Canterbury is a facility operated by the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, and provides dialysis services across Kent. The hospital was first established in 1793, moving to its current site in 1937. The Trust has a sustainable development management plan to reduce water consumption by 25% by 2020, and this led the renal technical department to review the Canterbury unit’s renal water system. What they found surprised them. 

The renal unit was built in 1971, and started to provide haemodialysis treatments for patients with end stage renal failure in 1972. Inpatient care is provided on Marlowe Ward, with 16 general and 14 acute nephrology beds, and a six-bed day case area. In addition, the unit has 30 outpatient dialysis stations in Thomas Beckett Ward, which operate 23 sessions a day for six days a week. The central renal dialysis water system is a fairly typical one (see Figure 1). A flow of 5,300 litres per hour of mains water is pretreated by softening, activated carbon filtration, and cartridge filtration, for particulate removal, before entering a break tank. Softening removes calcium and magnesium salts which could otherwise cause scaling in the downstream reverse osmosis (RO) unit, while activated carbon filtration removes free chlorine and chloramines which may be harmful to patients, and could also potentially damage the reverse osmosis membranes.