Resilience and capacity boosted at Newcastle’s RVI

A major upgrade of the HV and LV electrical infrastructure at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI), which took over a year in planning, and a further 18 months’ work to complete, has substantially boosted the site’s electrical capacity, increasing its resilience, and reducing power outages, after a peak of 10 such incidents in December 2017, as well as ‘future-proofing’ the hospital for several decades in the light of further major site development planned there. HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, met with Andy Fairless, the Operational Estates Engineering manager at the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, who explained how he and a small Trust electrical engineering team, an expert external electrical contractor, and Operations colleagues, worked together to complete the most complex engineering project of his career to date.

Andy Fairless began by putting his own involvement, and the timelines of the project, in context. Having spent 18 years in various Estates roles with the Trust from 1992 until 2010, he then had a fiveyear spell at two other north-east England Trusts. However, missing the challenges of a senior electrical role at a large acute hospital, he returned to the RVI in 2015, and almost immediately found himself involved in the major electrical upgrade project. This, he explained, took not only extensive design planning – which required all his skills and expertise, and those of his Estates engineering colleagues, but also those of two external electrical consulting engineers, and a north-east-based electrical contractor, to successfully complete. The result – the project was completed last December – is that the site’s electrical resilience has been substantially increased. The hospital, which shares its two incoming HV cables with the adjoining Newcastle University and the city’s Eldon Square Shopping Centre, is now considerably less at risk of power outages, and has a far greater electrical capacity. Alongside affording greater electrical resilience, the HV/LV upgrade will enable the RVI Estates team to begin undertaking key backlog maintenance and building upgrade work, confident in the knowledge that the electrical infrastructure will be up to the task. Equally, the Trust has plans to move its paediatric cardiac services from the Freeman Hospital in the east of Newcastle to a new centre to be constructed at the RVI. It also has a plan to re-locate some of its existing Maternity, HDU, and ITU facilities from the Leazes Wing at the RVI to a second new-build development at the hospital, so the electrical upgrade project had to be able to cater for future building developments.

Re-location strategy