Donna Talbot, director of Fundraising and Communications at the Arthur Rank Hospice Charity, and Louise Knights, an associate at LSI Architects, reflect on the challenges of designing a new home for the Hospice in Cambridge.

The national head of Healthcare at independent construction, property, and management consultancy, Rider Levett Bucknall, says that despite the Wave Four funding offered last December to NHS Trusts, ‘we are now in an era where there is less real healthcare capital expenditure in the UK’. He believes the clear tenet for all healthcare providers looking ahead will thus be ‘increasing self-reliance for project capital’

Following the success of an initial contract, a medical technology specialist is set to continue to help an NHS hospital Trust deliver orthopaedic procedures during a refurbishment project.

Martindale Electric’s new HPAT Series of portable appliance testers now includes the HPAT400 and updates to the company’s existing range, to enable both contractors and competent inhouse personnel to quickly and safely verify the electrical safety of all types of appliances.

Electrical engineer, Luigi D’Alessio MIHEEM, of engineering consultancy, Eta Projects, explains how a ‘FiveYear Risk Based Condition Report’ can form the cornerstone of a robust business continuity plan to ensure that NHS organisations comply with their duty to have in place continuity arrangements under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

A senior project manager at Essentia Trading reports on the built environment and estates consultancy’s project management of two recently completed contrasting and challenging refurbishment projects involving children’s facilities at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital.

Following the second anniversary of Grenfell Tower fire in West London in which 72 people died and 70 were injured, The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) has published a revised and updated version of its 'Guide E: Fire Safety Engineering'.

The Government should spend £8 billion immediately ‘to restore the quality of and access to adult social care in England to acceptable levels’, and then introduce free personal care, funded through general taxation, over a five-year period, says a House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report, 'Social care funding: time to end a national scandal', published on 4 July.

Speaking in a keynote on the first day of October’s Healthcare Estates 2019 conference in Manchester, shortly after the director and head of Profession for NHS Estates & Facilities at NHSE/NHSI, Simon Corben, in his address, had emphasised the importance of a flexible EFM workforce willing to embrace new skills and adapt to new challenges.

Consultant ophthalmologist and director of Digital Innovation at Moorfields Eye Hospital, Peter Thomas, and Iain Livingstone, consultant ophthalmologist and acute Tele-ophthalmology system lead from NHS Forth Valley in Scotland, have delivered what they say is the world’s first tele-examination of an eye in 4K resolution using 5G broadband, streamed live to a conference in Edinburgh.

Mark Jackson, deputy director of Estates, Facilities and IT at The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, considers the key benefits he has seen from his experience of implementing DFN Project SEARCH’s innovative training programme across three different Trusts.

For Eastwood Park, 2019 is more significant than most. This year the long-established training centre celebrates 50 years of delivering specialist engineering, decontamination, and estates and facilities management training. Helen Cornes, senior marketing executive at the Gloucestershire training facility, looks back at its development, and at how its course portfolio has both adapted and expanded over the years, in line with the significant changes in the sector.

In September 2018, the new £200 m Chase Farm Hospital near Enfield opened to become what its operator, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, believes is the NHS’s most advanced digital hospital.

Tinaz Ranina, Product manager, Infection Prevention & Personal Care at Diversey, UK & Ireland, takes a look at some of the increasingly powerful and effective disinfectants and advanced ‘adjunct technologies’ now available to help hospital cleaning teams in the fight against the ever-more resistant pathogens in healthcare facilities that can cause hospital-acquired infections.

The head of Healthcare at an independent construction, property, and management consultancy, argues that estates and facilities management teams must adopt an ever more innovative approach to optimising estate utilisation, and sets out a four-pronged approach.

Topics at an IHEEM one-day conference last month ranged from minimising the proliferation of Pseudomonas in hospital water systems to key changes in the recently revised HTM 06-01 ‘Electrical services’ guidance.

The D 08 Supplement to HTM 04-01 on TMVs has been updated to simplify and speed the in-service auditing and testing of these devices.

The assistant estates director at a Dublin hospital discusses the extent to which hospital BEMS systems can increase efficiency and minimise energy consumption.

Farrans Construction’s building of a new £36 million inpatient ward complex, the new North Wing, at Londonderry’s Altnagelvin Area Hospital, marks the continuation of a successful partnership between the contactor, its design and supply team, and the facility’s operator, theWestern Health and Social Care Trust.

The Compliance Audit and Risk Assessment (CARA) service from BOC Medical Engineering Risk Management Services is designed to give hospitals the information necessary to manage risk on their medical gas pipeline system, in line with HTM 02-01 guidelines.