Oil-free technology for the production of medical air is used in many medical gas systems around the world, and is a requirement of the standards in many places.

Fulton has supplied a skid-mounted, dual-fuel-fired steam boiler package to Southmead Hospital as part of North Bristol NHS Trust’s £430 million PFI redevelopment of the site (HEJ – May 2014).

Steam from the ‘package’, featuring two Fulton 60J boilers plus ancillaries, is used during washing and sterilisation of surgical equipment and instruments at the hospital’s temporary central sterile services department (CSSD).

David Easton, chair of IHEEM’s Medical Devices Technology Platform, says he is keen that ‘all interested parties’ are aware that the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) has published its revision of the Device Bulletin 2006(5) November 2006.

In HEJ’s latest technical guidance article, Paul Reeve, director of Business Services at the Electrical Contractors’ Association (ECA), discusses some of the key issues surrounding dealing with asbestos when refurbishing healthcare properties.

A look at the benefits – especially for SMEs – of Dynamic Purchasing Systems – electronic systems used by a public bodies to purchase commonly used goods, works, or services.

A manufacturer of nurse call equipment considers how its capabilities and features have developed over time, and presents its own standpoint on what to look for when specifying.

Mike Elver, Healthcare Sector account manager at Andrews Sykes Hire, discusses the importance of ensuring that healthcare estates are well prepared for the summer heat.

The variable quality of new surgical instruments arriving at a leading London hospital, and an auditing process to ensure defective such devices never reach the operating theatre, were discussed at a recent IHEEM seminar.

Hospital estates teams are no strangers to ensuring that they have a ready supply of diesel stored on site ready to fuel standby generators in the event of a power outage.

Last September Andrew Lansley claimed that some NHS Trusts occupying PFI healthcare facilities had been ‘landed with deals they could not afford’, seemingly attributing much of the blame for a scenario where the Department of Health said 22 Trusts in England alone could be at significant financial risk to Labour.

Paul Franklin, who heads up the Technical team at Bedford-based specialist testing and defect analysis company, RAM Consultancy, explains how healthcare building owners and occupiers such as NHS Trusts, and their estates and facilities teams, can best manage, maintain, and, when necessary, refurbish, their building envelope and roofs, in the process gaining some perhaps unexpected benefits.

Robert Snook, director and general manager of Portakabin Hire, offers some practical advice to, as he puts it, ‘help healthcare providers rapidly expand hospital facilities to reduce patient waiting times with no compromise on the quality of the accommodation’.

The Care Quality Commission (CWC) has told Barts Health NHS Trust it must make ‘urgent improvements to protect patients’ at Whipps Cross University Hospital after issuing three formal warnings following unannounced inspections at the facility in Leytonstone in May and June. The inspection team included ‘experts by experience’ (service users), a practising midwife, and a practising surgical unit manager.

With good fire safety strategy, and, for instance, ensuring that staff are properly trained in, and familiar with, the correct procedures should a major fire necessitate evacuation, being a key priority for healthcare facilities of all kinds.

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Eurostar are among recent customers of FirePro, a specialist in modular fire suppression products and control systems.

The IFHE’s 2013 Council and Executive Committee Meetings will take place at 9.00 am on 9 and 10 September respectively at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre in Putrajaya, Malaysia (pictured), just before the BEAM (Biomedical Engineering Association of Malaysia) 2013 Hospital Engineering Conference and Exhibition gets under way at the venue.

In the second of a series of articles planned to run regularly in HEJ (see the January 2013 issue for the first) designed to provide healthcare engineers with sound technical guidance on equipment or technology-related topics.

One of the four conference streams at last month’s Healthcare Estates 2014 event focused on some of the key engineering challenges and opportunities facing healthcare estates managers and healthcare engineers. Mike Arrowsmith, HEJ’s technical editor, provides an overview of the engineering sessions at this year’s IHEEM conference.

A document titled A risk-based methodology for establishing and managing backlog and published by The Stationery Office puts forward best practice advice, and, for this HEJ article, extracts of the contents have been adapted.

It is essential that the physical condition of the NHS estate is accurately assessed and maintained to ensure it is fit for purpose and safe for patients and staff.

For this article, Paul Robbins IEng MIHEEM IIPEM MCMI, electro-medical services manager, technical support services, Papworth Hospital NHS Trust, has been awarded IHEEM’s Northcroft Silver Medal. The article, previously published in the June 2005 edition of Health Estate Journal, outlines the rationale for using a risk management based medical device support program that incorporates the best elements of industrial practice.

The NHS is moving to a climate of payment by results, and this requires resources to be targeted where they are most effective. To the private engineering sector this is nothing new, as modern production lines can be halted quickly when plant fails, therefore our industrial colleagues have to ensure that their maintenance regimes are targeted to support mission critical elements of the business. To this end industry has developed many systems such as Reliability Engineering (RA) or Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), all of which have as their basis the application of Risk Management (RM) to support this aim (Fig. 1).