The electrical infrastructure of many major healthcare sites was designed in a different era, and has evolved over decades in reaction to changing circumstances and advances in technology. Ed McNaught, Healthcare specialist at TGA Consulting Engineers, discusses some of the key steps to take to ensure that such infrastructure can provide resilient standby power supply to 100% of clinical facilities, and, increasingly, can also accommodate embedded renewable generation.
With over 40 years' electrical engineering experience, of which much of the last 20 have been spent advising NHS Estates managers, it's clear to me that there are wide variations in the condition of healthcare estates. Some estates have modernised, but there are many where critical resilience relies on the performance of 40- or 50-year-old electrical equipment. While this equipment was well designed and built, and has remained reliable well beyond its designated life, the availability of spares and the skilled personnel to maintain it are becoming scarcer, and the risk of critical failure increasing. This in turn presents a greater risk to staff and patient safety, that is fast becoming untenable.
As we move towards Net Zero Carbon, and become ever more reliant on electricity, the grid will come under growing pressure countrywide, so it is essential that healthcare estates can cope with the increased electrical loads that come with decarbonisation, as well as with power supply disruption. The increasing risk of more frequent cyberattacks on hospitals, such as the incident on 3 June which severely affected services at some major London hospitals — described as 'one of the most serious in British history' — reinforces the need for hospital infrastructure to be self-sufficient, resilient, and resistant to such attacks.
So, what can be done? The modern hospital estate needs electrical infrastructure that:
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