In a paper awarded 'Best Member Paper' at the 2016 Institute of Hospital Engineering, Australia (IHEA) National Conference held at the Adelaide Oval last October, Mark Hooper BEng, executive project manager at Echuca Regional Health in Victoria, Australia, describes a A$66 million redevelopment project at the hospital--which is located in the historic port town of Echuca on the Murray river, two and a half hours north of Melbourne. He highlights some of the significant innovation that went into the project, in areas including plant operation and maintenance, emergency planning, resilience, and patient and staff comfort.
It is often said that the quality of the parking experience at a hospital or other healthcare facility makes one of the most lasting impressions on visitors. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to Phillip Herring, managing director at Indigo, the UK arm of one of Europe's leading 'bespoke parking solution' providers, to discover how, harnessing first-class customer service, the latest technology, and the ability to offer anything from simple car park management to 30-year Design Build Finance Operate (DBFO) packages, the company is looking to extend a UK healthcare parking contract portfolio which already sees it work with 11 NHS Trusts across England, Scotland, and Wales.
Without substantial investment in the NHS estate, the Five Year Forward View cannot be delivered, and the estate will 'remain unfit for purpose and continue to deteriorate', an independent review of NHS property and estate in England headed by Sir Robert Naylor, the former CEO of University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (pictured), concludes. Among the recommendations of the DH-commissioned review--which considers the opportunities to generate valuable funds via the sale of under-utilised NHS properties--is the establishment of 'a powerful new NHS Property Board', to 'provide leadership to the centre, and expertise and delivery support to Sustainability and Transformation Plans'.
Gerrett Lim, a sustainable building and LEED technical advisor at architecture and design firm, Perkins+Will, describes how the design and construction of a new a five-storey, 205,000 ft(2) wing at the Chinook Regional Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta, was the first healthcare project in Canada to register with the new LEED-HC rating system.
With the UK's first high-energy Proton Beam Therapy Centre set to open next year at Manchester's The Christie, young patients with head and neck tumours, cancers close to the skull or spine, or a variety of soft tissue tumours, and adults with cancers difficult to treat using 'conventional' photon-based radiotherapy will, for the first time, be able to receive NHS proton beam therapy (PBT) without having to travel overseas. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, visited the site of The Christie's new £135 million PBT Centre to find out more about the design and construction of a facility which interserve construction director for the North-West, Phil Shaw, describes as one of the most complex and specialist he has worked on.
Concerned that engineering skills gaps, compounded by difficulties in attracting skilled tradespeople, will leave the Trust's Estates team poorly equipped and insufficiently skilled to meet the challenge of keeping a large acute hospital running efficiently over coming years, the management team within the Estates Maintenance Department at the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has introduced a Workforce Development Programme to tackle existing skills gaps, bring in and retain able and enthusiastic new recruits, and ensure strong succession planning. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, met with the Trust's director of estates, Mark Bagnall, and head of Estates Maintenance, Paul Stafford, to find out more.
Blanca Beato-Arribas, the Asset Performance Team leader at BSRIA, the ISO 9001-registered test, instruments, research, and consultancy organisation, describes her recent work testing the design of isolation rooms that allow the room to be optimally used for both infectious and immunocompromised patients. With pressure differentials the determining factor when controlling infection between an isolation suite and the rest of the hospital, she explains that air permeability levels within the suite should be as low as possible.
Shaun Oakes, managing director at ievo, a north-east England-based manufacturer of biometric fingerprint readers, argues that growing use of biometrics technology can improve security and afford better protection to premises, valuable items, and people, across an ever-busier NHS.
Steve Squire, head of Sika Major Projects, discusses approaches to integrated specification at the New Papworth Hospital, which is currently under construction at the famous Addenbrooke's Hospital site in Cambridge. He explains that ensuring that the fabric of the building supports an extended service life for the hospital, excellent build quality, and reduced maintenance, have been a high priority, with Sika supplying a number of its products for use in different parts of the structure.
Julia Fishman, managing director and vice-President, Clinical Strategy, at TeleTracking Technologies, discusses the in-use benefits of patient, staff, and asset tracking and flow technologies, arguing that their effective deployment across an NHS under considerable pressure on many fronts can free up more time to care, bring considerable cost and wider efficiencies, and help to address the perennial issue of 'bed blocking'.
Catherine Zeliotis, healthcare leader and senior associate at global healthcare architectural practice, Stantec (pictured), discusses the latest thinking in the design of cancer centres, providing best practice examples from Stantec projects throughout the world.
Steve Stott, managing director of Medical Air, discusses the many benefits of ultraclean ventilation systems in the 21st century operating theatre environment, explaining that the development of ever-more advanced and 'flexibly designed' UCV canopies has enabled them to be installed in a wide range of theatres, extending the variety of surgeries that can be undertaken, while helping to minimise the risk of surgical site infection.
Few will doubt that electrical supplies in healthcare premises need to be designed and maintained to standards exceeding those encountered in domestic premises. Alongside the need to ensure continuity of electrical supplies--hence the importance of properly maintained emergency standby generators to ensure that vital medical electrical (ME) equipment and building services systems can operate without interruption--patients may be particularly vulnerable to electrical hazards during medical procedures, due to the attachment to the skin of applied parts of ME equipment, and/or their introduction into the body. Here Al Rufaie, BSc CEng MIET FIHEEM, who has 40 years' electrical industry experience, including over 10 years at the Department of Health providing electrical technology and safety guidance to the NHS, covers these elements, and details the patient protection requirements and various classifications of medical locations.
Edward James, workstream lead, Estates, Facilities and Professional Services Workstream, at NHS London Procurement Partnership (pictured), looks at the workings and benefits of Dynamic Purchasing Systems--electronic systems used by a public bodies to purchase commonly used goods, works, or services. One of the major benefits, he explains, is that under a 'DPS'--an 'open market' system revised in 2015--smaller businesses have a greater opportunity to win business than in traditional ('closed') framework agreements.
Fire safety in healthcare premises has always been a challenge to those that discharge this duty. Statutory compliance should be a matter of course, but in an ever increasingly challenged NHS, even this is not a given. While the NHS is driven by managing very complex risk to deliver cutting edge healthcare, providers cannot be risk averse. Which risk, however, takes priority? Here Peter Aldridge, fire and corporate services manager at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and Secretary to the National Association of Healthcare Fire Officers (NAHFO)--which will this month and next jointly stage fire safety seminars with IHEEM; see page 8--considers the key issues, with input from a fire officer at a leading mental health and community Trust.
In an article first published in the December 2015 issue of The Australian Hospital Engineer, Kim Bruton, a former editor of the magazine, who is chief engineer at Northeast Health Wangaratta (NHW), Victoria, discusses the installation of a new main switchboard for a 202-bed sub-regional hospital in north-east Victoria in Australia, and some of the key obstacles that had to be overcome. Throughout the project normal power supplies had to be maintained at all times to the hospital's theatre suites, emergency department, and critical care unit. The A$1.05 m project was delivered on time and on budget in compliance with the projected desired outcomes.
Suzanne Callander reports on the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust's installation of the UK's first Steris VaproQuip fully enclosed decontamination room system, which has enabled considerably quicker, simultaneous decontamination of equipment such as drips stands, computers, and keyboards within a single space. The system's purchase is just one element of a committed and considerably broader Trust drive to reduce healthcare-associated infections (HCAls), and particularly to reduce cases of C. difficile. This has also seen implemented a wide range of other cleaning and decontamination activities--from use of mobile HPV units to systematic ward decants and touch point cleaning.
Speaking at a Legionella Control Association Open Day on 9 October last year in Tamworth, Mike Quest, an LCA director and Committee Member who is an independent water hygiene and safety consultant and an NHS Authorising Engineer, presented his standpoint on effective risk assessment and monitoring of complex hot and cold water systems. He also focused on some of the challenges for engineering and estates teams in maintaining water temperatures within 'safe limits' in modern buildings, with reference to the complications he had seen in a hospital project he has recently been working on.
Chris Wiegand, CEO of Jibestream, a software development company for digital interactive technologies with bases in Toronto and Arlington, Virginia, explains how technologies including Wi-Fi, GPS, RFID, and Bluetooth LE are enhancing wayfinding in healthcare facilities, and, in the process, simplifying the patient journey and helping reduce the stress and anxiety often associated with a visit to the hospital.
Highly experienced medical gasspecialist, Geoff Dillow, considers the particular challenges of designing, installing, and testing, medical gas systems used in the mobile units widely deployed on hospital sites in recent years for surgical and clinical use. In the first part of a two-part article, he explains that the design and construction limitations particular to such units can result in them incorporating medical gas systems that are not 100 per cent compliant with HTM 02-01, and argues for a pragmatic approach to addressing this. Part 2 will examine the engineering and pharmaceutical testing requirements of mobile installations.
