For Eastwood Park, 2019 is more significant than most. This year the long-established training centre celebrates 50 years of delivering specialist engineering, decontamination, and estates and facilities management training. Helen Cornes, senior marketing executive at the Gloucestershire training facility, looks back at its development, and at how its course portfolio has both adapted and expanded over the years, in line with the significant changes in the sector.
Since 1969, Eastwood Park has hosted trainees, engineers, managers, and directors in their formative years – many of whom are now working in healthcare services all over the world, and are today sending their teams for the latest training. Fifty years on, the centre continues to provide world-class healthcare and FM training. Eastwood Park, ‘the training centre’, was founded in 1969 when the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) acquired the estate and established the Hospital Engineering Centre, delivering residential training for National Health Service engineering staff. A short while later, the first ever course for all grades of NHS hospital engineers – ‘Electronics appreciation’ – was delivered, and the centre commonly became known as ‘Falfield’ among NHS employees – a name still frequently used among Eastwood Park’s longstanding delegates today.
In the summer of 1977, the centre extended its facilities with the opening of the brand new Northcroft Hall (today renamed Falfield). It was opened by former President of the Institute of Hospital Engineering (now IHEEM), Lionel Northcroft OBE.
A strong and close rapport
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