Sixty-five years ago this month, as the Allied Forces celebrated Japan’s unconditional surrender, the first ever edition of “The Hospital Engineer Newsletter”, the forerunner to Health Estate Journal, was published.
Within this issue members will find a facsimile copy, in which there is a lengthy treatise welcoming the cessation of hostilities in World War II. Welcoming the end of “the menace from the skies”, the Editor recalls how healthcare engineers will “well remember those hectic nights guarding our hospitals from fire and patching up the broken wards and casualty reception departments”. The historic publication includes a paper describing the challenge of maintaining a reliable electrical supply at a large, unnamed hospital, and several early branch reports, while the concluding article, “Send for the engineer”, humorously describes a hospital engineer’s role in attending to problems ranging from a castor falling off a patient’s bed, and a steriliser ceasing to operate properly, to a chase for a mouse. While healthcare technology has changed beyond recognition, and the problem of how to black out hospital windows may no longer be one for today’s estates team, the first ever IHEEM journal makes clear that, as today, without hospital engineers’ skills no healthcare facility can hope to operate efficiently, or indeed to provide the best possible care to patients.
