Contingency planning will pay dividends

In hospitals and other healthcare facilities – as with any large commercial or publicly-used building – an effective and ongoing maintenance strategy should help minimise the occurrence of unplanned periods of downtime due to equipment breakdown or failure. However, we cannot escape the fact that the likes of extreme temperature spikes or dips can occur, and put added strain on temperature control equipment. If a chiller or boiler were to fail in an office or factory, while it would greatly inconvenience and potentially affect production output, it would not have a critical effect on lives. The same cannot, of course, be said for healthcare applications. 

Often temperature-critical areas hold N+1 resilience in terms of the availability of at least one back-up system. However, when it comes to ageing equipment, conducting vital maintenance work to maintain the performance of the plant for as long as possible, rather than replacing it, is increasingly becoming the norm in healthcare facilities – due to a lack of available capital resource for investing in new plant. In many cases, old cooling or heating plant is having to work at full capacity. As a result, poor performance is often experienced, and equipment can quickly become strained, or start to show signs of failure. When disaster strikes, trying to resolve a critical application failure without a pre-agreed plan is likely to add significant time and cost to the incident, as all parties will effectively have to begin from a standing start. Having a plan in place – whether it is referred to as a ‘contingency’, ‘resilience’, ‘disaster recovery’, or ‘emergency response plan’ – is absolutely essential in the healthcare sector.

Fail to plan, plan to fail