Independent ice and snow clearance company, Nationwide Gritting Services (NGS), says its has been keeping roads, car parks, and pedestrian walkways clear of ice and snow at hospitals and healthcare complexes for many years, ‘offering a guaranteed service, no matter how severe the winter weather’.
The company says: “Hospitals, along with other public buildings, industrial estates, office complexes, and university campuses, have a duty of care to both employees and visitors. For hospitals in particular, there can be few more embarrassing accidents than staff or patients being injured on the premises by slipping on ice.”
During last winter’s severe winter, when it claims the whole of the UK was ‘in imminent danger of running out of road salt’, NGS was still able to deliver high quality marine salt, and prides itself on ‘never having let a customer down – despite, and perhaps because of, the last few years of prolonged sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfalls’.
Claiming to be Britain’s largest importer of marine salt, and one of Europe’s leading salt traders, NGS has a 500,000 tonne stockholding at Southampton Docks, and has recently established a multi-modal logistics centre that enables salt to be delivered by road, rail, or sea, to anywhere in the UK. The facility is constantly replenished via deliveries of over 50,000 tonnes of salt, which arrive by ship from all over the world. The salt is then either trans-shipped to smaller vessels and delivered to ports around the UK, or, more commonly, delivered to customers via a combination of multi-model rail and road freight -- delivery methods that minimise carbon footprint.
Nationwide Gritting Services says: “Guaranteeing supplies of salt is brave and potentially risky, but no customer has ever been let down by NGS. Marine salt is always available for customers, and the highest priority is given to those who choose NGS as a private gritting contractor. This service has been developed around a systematic approach through experience and listening to customers’ requirements. “The gritting service relies not solely on the skills, abilities, and experience, of the teams of drivers and manual workers involved, but also on constant communication between these experts and the NGS headquarters. Proven telemetry and communications technology, coupled with pre-determined routes, schedules and working practices, mean operations managers know exactly where teams are, and what they are doing.”
NGS operates a three-stage alert system based on detailed information on weather forecasts: Green – where there is no need for action; Amber, where there is a risk of ice and sub-zero temperatures; and Red, where it is already freezing or there is imminent danger of ice forming. Consequently, hospital managers not only have a direct, 24-hour link to the NGS control room, but can also be assured that when a scheduled treatment visit is due to take place – it happens.
