Expert speakers focus on today’s challenges

An IHEEM Regional Conference and Exhibition hosted by the Institute’s Wales Branch in Cardiff in late August took place almost 75 years to the day after IHEEM was founded, and just over 70 years since Aneurin Bevan launched the NHS at Park Hospital in Manchester. Conference topics ranged from fire safety in healthcare facilities to the pros and cons of laminar flow operating theatres. Expert speakers also discussed achieving infection control from several standpoints, and there were updates on the construction of one of two NHS high energy proton beam therapy centres, and a new £350 million hospital being built near Cwmbran which will offer complex specialist and critical care treatment to over 600,000 people in South-East Wales. Here HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports on the conference’s first day.

The conference – held at Cardiff City Hall – began with a welcome from IHEEM Past-President and morning session chair, Greg Markham, who welcomed delegates, exhibitors, and guests, and invited the first speaker, Dr Marion Lyons, senior Medical officer, Health Protection, at the Welsh Government, to the podium. In a short presentation, ‘NHS – looking back, looking forward’, Dr Lyons drew some interesting comparisons between the NHS as it was in 1948, and as it is today. While in 1948, average male and female life expectancies were 66 and 70, today the comparative figures are 70 and 84, and while in the year of the service’s foundation it employed 144,000 personnel, today, as the UK’s biggest employer, the NHS has around 1.7 million staff. Interestingly, hospital bed numbers have fallen – from 480,000 in 1948 to 137,000 in 2018, while in contrast, the number of prescriptions issued annually has risen from 93.6 m in 1948 to 1.2 billion today. Among a raft of ‘major achievements’ in the NHS’s 70 years to date, Dr Lyons noted, had been 1953’s description of the structure of DNA, the introduction of the first measles vaccine in 1968, 1978’s delivery of the first test tube baby, the first liver, lung, and heart transplant in 1986, the establishment of the NHS organ donor register in 1994, and the first double hand transplant in 2010.

Today’s biggest challenges