The key role that the organisation plays as the regulatory body for the UK engineering sector, and some of the existing formal requirements for registration as an Engineering Technician, Incorporated, or Chartered Engineer, or Information and Communications Technology Technician, as well as the future of engineering education, and the need for the sector to ‘innovate to develop future engineers’, were the subject of a Healthcare Estates 2019 conference presentation by the Engineering Council’s CEO, Alasdair Coates, in October. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Alasdair Coates gave his conference presentation on the first morning of last October’s Healthcare Estates 2019 event, immediately following a keynote from Simon Corben, director and head of Profession, NHS Estates and Facilities at NHSE/NHSI (HEJ – November 2019), in which the latter discussed some of the work and achievements of his team over the previous year. In his conference address, speech, Simon Corben stressed the importance of a stable, able, and adaptable workforce in meeting some of the changing challenges facing an evermore technology-enabled NHS. All the keynote presentations on the 2019 IHEEM conference’s first morning in fact had a strong workforce and career developmentrelated theme. The presentation from the IFHE’s President, Darryl Pitcher – which followed that of Alasdair Coates (see HEJ – November 2019) – focused on recent work by the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, Australia, to develop an online system via which the country’s healthcare engineering and healthcare estates management personnel can record their key ‘on-the-job’ learnings, and thus demonstrate their competence and all-round skills in a broad range of different estates and engineering-related activities against certified standards.
Water and transportation background
Alasdair Coates BEng (Hons) MSc, CEng, FICE, MCIHT, CMIOSH, has over 40 years’ experience in the planning, design, management, and implementation of infrastructure projects both in the UK and internationally, with a particular focus on water and transportation projects, predominantly in the consulting sector. Joining Halcrow Group in 1987, he held a number of senior roles, including Group Board director, managing director, Transportation, and Regional managing director for Europe. In 2011 Halcrow was acquired by CH2MHill, and he played a key role in the successful integration as the company’s Infrastructure International operations director, before joining Network Rail in 2015 as Route managing director, South East.
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
