Early engineers’ lot was not an easy one

In the run-up to the Institute’s 75th Anniversary this year, IHEEM’s head office team spent some time looking back through a variety of archive material held at the Portsmouth base. A ‘Statement’ published in 1965 explains that ‘the Institution’ was founded on 28 August 1943 at an inaugural meeting at Nottingham City Hospital attended by ‘some 40 people’. These included Chief Engineers from hospitals in England and Wales, and representatives from the Institution of Engineers-in-Charge and the L.C.C Engineers’ Organisation. It notes that ‘the founders were of the opinion that there was a need for a national organisation to co-ordinate exchange of information between the engineers themselves, and between the engineers and those with whom they came into contact, about the work engineers in hospitals did’. The first overseas member, a French hospital engineer, was elected in 1959, and a quarterly journal – in the form of a ‘newsletter’ – introduced in September 1945. By 1953 this had developed into ‘a monthly journal of a technical nature.’

Splendid isolation

A separate document published later – in 1995 – by The Institute of Hospital Engineering West of Scotland Branch, and titled ‘Resumé of Background and Activities’, meanwhile notes that ‘the Institute had its beginnings prior to the advent of the National Health Service’, adding: ‘At the time, hospitals were administered each in splendid isolation by a number of different authorities’. The Scottish document explains that hospitals were ‘financed by private subscription, and administered by management committees, with the teaching hospitals organised in a similar way’, but ‘further assisted by grant aid from associated universities’, while ‘institutions such as infectious disease hospitals’ were managed by local authorities, and the ‘asylums’, or mental hospitals, ‘by management committees under the Mental Health Acts’.