With side rooms in ever shorter supply across NHS hospitals, the Department of Health has developed an ingenious portable isolation unit that can be rapidly assembled around the bed of patients suffering infections such as those caused by MRSA and Clostridium difficile to help prevent cross-infection and simultaneously help reduce bed blocking.

How the health service, designers and architects can learn from the best hospitals already built to develop healthcare buildings which offer both an improved business case operationally and a more sustainable footprint, as well as sufficient adaptability to accommodate the growing shift from acute to primary care, was the focus of a joint Mansell/BT event staged recently in London. HEJ reports.

A new cancer treatment and haematology centre which brings together into one modern, “cutting edge” facility oncology services from a diverse range of properties, many of them 1940s-built, at Oxford’s Churchill Hospital, is claimed to be among the most eco-friendly, as well as technologically advanced, such units yet seen in Europe. Jonathan Baillie reports.

Aspiring and experienced surgeons across the West Midlands can now hone their skills in a highly realistic simulated operating theatre environment following the recent opening of a new surgical skills training centre at the University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire, said to be among the UK’s first such facilities to offer training using real human tissue.

Late last year the Engineering Council UK, which holds the national registers of Chartered Engineers, Incorporated Engineers, Engineering Technicians, and Information and Communication Technology Technicians, dropped the “UK” from its name to reflect its growing international focus.

Agreeing to spend £88,000 to sign her Trust up to a new online guide that will provide information on disabled access provision for some individual 300 healthcare sites throughout the county was “an extremely easy decision”, NHS Suffolk chief executive Carole Taylor-Brown told a London audience recently.

Simon Keel, product executive at air-conditioning equipment specialist Daikin UK, discusses climate control solutions for the hospital environment as a raft of environmental legislation, and the need to cut both costs and emissions, hit home.

Simon Keel, product executive at air-conditioning equipment specialist Daikin UK, discusses climate control solutions for the hospital environment as a raft of environmental legislation, and the need to cut both costs and emissions, hit home.

Static Systems Group, a specialist in the design, supply, installation and maintenance of bedhead services and advanced communication systems, looks back at how nurse call systems and bedhead services trunking systems have developed to meet evolving healthcare and hospital trends.

Melvyn Langford, a former NHS estates and facilities manager with a number of Trusts and now an independent risk management consultant, describes the development and subsequent application of a model designed to help NHS Trusts, including their estates and facilities functions, to identify, monitor and manage key risks which, if not addressed, could impact on business continuity and patient care.

With estates and facilities “very much in fashion” given that patients now increasingly put cleanliness and the “general environment” at the top of their agenda, estates personnel now have an opportunity to be “right at the heart of healthcare”, said Health Facilities Scotland (HFS) director Paul Kingsmore, keynote speaker at the recent 2009 Healthcare Facilities Consortium conference in Oxford.

Ken Dickinson, operations manager for NG Bailey, M&E contractor for the new St Helens and Whiston Hospitals in Merseyside (pictured), describes how off-site construction of a high proportion of the electrical and services modules required for the two new hospitals benefited the overall construction process, while simultaneously reducing safety risk, paring waste, cutting the number of deliveries to site, and improving the quality and consistency of electrical and mechanical fittings.

As Robert Hacker, at the time director of facilities management at the St John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, California, explains, the hospital, one of the area’s largest, recently successfully utilised a new technology to eliminate mould, selecting a cost and time-saving fumigation process in place of the traditional “rip and tear” method.

A “teenage penthouse” designed in consultation with patients and nurses with an “inspiring, homely feel”, and conceived using “sensitive architecture” to support young people in their fight against cancer, is how architect John McRae of ORMS Architecture Design describes the award-winning new Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) unit at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. Jonathan Baillie reports.

The 2010 Architects for Health (AfH) Student Health Design Awards, presented recently at the RIBA’s London headquarters, saw the highest number of entries – at nearly 100 – in the event’s four-year history, with architecture and interior design students from all over the world demonstrating their talent, imagination, and creative skills, in the quest for the top prize.

A recently published National Audit Office (NAO) report says that, although most of the 70-plus English PFI hospital contracts now operational are “achieving the value for money expected when the contracts were signed”, there “continue to be risks” to the long-term value of others.

Building maintenance and the construction of new healthcare facilities are central to maintaining the NHS’s infrastructure, but such work is costly, and subject to intense financial scrutiny.

Paul Brockway, senior sustainability consultant at Arup, reports on a carbon footprint study undertaken at the Barts and the London NHS Trust which set out to “understand carbon hotspots and identify actions that can save both money and carbon”.

An impressive new health and social care centre designed to act as a focal point for the local community in Dudley in the West Midlands, which brings together a wide range of medical and social care services, has won the architects string of awards, including, most recently, the award for Best Design in the LIFT Awards 2010.

Independent consultant to the healthcare sector Dr Melvyn Langford says a “fundamental flaw” in the way the long-established NHS “5 x 5” criticality grid used to assess the urgency of backlog maintenance has been interpreted could be giving NHS estates and facilities personnel, and in turn Trust boards, a distorted picture of the true risk being posed by the condition of key hospital buildings, plant, and equipment.