Flushing compliance enhanced at St George’s

The estates team at St George’s Hospital in south London say the deployment of a web-based software system which verifies that ‘responsible’ staff across the site have regularly flushed low-use water outlets to maintain flow, and thus prevent potentially dangerous waterborne bacteria building up in pipework, has ‘very substantially’ increased compliance with approved flushing practice – as set out in the HSE’s L8 Approved Code of Practice on controlling Legionella bacteria in water systems, and the new HTM 04-01, Safe Water in Healthcare Premises. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports, the hospital’s use of Digital Missives’ L8guard software system has also saved considerable staff time, eliminated the need to manually input data from thousands of paper flushing return forms, and enabled the Estates team to easily identify departments not undertaking regular flushing. 

St George’s Hospital in Tooting (pictured) is one of England’s principal teaching hospitals, serving around 1.3 m people living across south-west London. A large number of its services – including cardiothoracic medicine and surgery, neurosciences, and renal transplantation – are also provided to significant populations in Surrey and Sussex. The hospital’s operator, St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, also provides care for patients from a large catchment area in south-east England for specialities such as pelvic trauma, while other services – such as HIV care, and bone marrow transplantation for non-cancer diseases – are offered to patients from across the country. The hospital shares its campus with medical school, St George’s, University of London. 

Like many large acute hospitals, the buildings vary considerably in age; maintaining them is the job of the Trust’s 60-strong Estates Team, led by head of Estates and Facilities, Peter Alesbury, who took up the role in late 2013, having immediately previously been head of Group Facilities at private healthcare provider, Circle Partnership. When I met up with him, and L8guard’s founder and director, Tim Moore, at the hospital recently, Peter Alesbury explained that since he joined the Trust, the Estates team had put an ever stronger emphasis on managing the hospital’s water system safely and cost-effectively. Ensuring that water outlets – and particularly those less used – are regularly flushed to maintain flow, and thus prevent harmful bacteria such as Legionella and Pseudomonas building up in stagnant water and deadlegs, is among the key elements.