Who is best to carry out ventilation verification?

At Healthcare Estates 2024, ventilation verification professionals, Dr Louise Webb, AE (Ventilation) of DRLC, and Gareth Twynam, managing director at AirisQ, discussed the challenges of ensuring that the air-handling plant supplying clean air to operating theatres and other critical areas is adequately monitored and managed. Here they explore the issues that annual ventilation plant checks – known as ventilation verifications – bring up, comparing and contrasting how the roles of professional ventilation verifier and Authorising Engineer (Ventilation) are positioned to ensure indoor air in healthcare premises is of the highest quality.

HTM 03-01: Specialised ventilation for healthcare premises. Part B: The management, operation, maintenance and routine testing of existing healthcare ventilation systems, recommends that air-handling units and theatre suites are checked annually using a standard checklist. The checklist for the ventilation plant is found in Appendix 1, and is titled Annual inspection of critical ventilation systems — AHU and plantroom equipment. The other area that the guidance directs attention to is found in Appendix 2 — Operating suite annual verification. This is concerned with an annual check of the fabric of the operating theatre itself, and associated rooms such as the anaesthetic room and dirty utility.

HTM 03-01 does not specify who should carry out the annual verification of critical ventilation. It would be possible, as asserted in the HEJ article, 'A look at bringing verification in house', (HEJ — October 2024, pages 113 to 116), to carry out the Annual Verifications using staff from the Estates Department. Dr Scott Brown's article cites the Competent Person as the most suitable member of the Estates team to carry out this work.