With patient safety a priority, NHS staff need uninterrupted access to clinical data 24 hours per day, 365 days a year. Phil McEneaney, from STULZ UK, warns that a failure to understand the difference between comfort cooling and precision cooling is resulting in poorly specified equipment – ‘leading to higher costs, IT failures, and increased risk’.
Hospitals need to ensure constant uptime of their IT infrastructure. Investment in reliable cooling is a fundamental aspect of this requirement – server rooms that are subjected to high thermal loads need constant climatic conditions in order to work reliably.
Poorly specified cooling technology can result in erratic climate control, increased operating expenditure, and costly disruption to IT operations. In recent years, the government and national NHS leaders have set out a high-level vision and goals for digitising the NHS. From lifesaving decision-making tools and patient monitoring technologies, to electronic patient records and tracking of medical devices, reliable IT has become the backbone of the NHS, and is critical to the delivery of safe, efficient care. However, are installers of cooling solutions prepared for these developments? A lack of awareness of the differences between comfort cooling and precision cooling is impacting the reliability of IT infrastructure, resulting in serious consequences for hospitals and the NHS.
Far too many hospitals and medical centres install comfort cooling in small server rooms, instead of the correct precision cooling. This is a common mistake; there is a need for education on the importance of precision cooling in delivering resilient IT operations. We are frequently called in to replace inappropriate units installed in technical spaces.
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