Biggest Awards Dinner yet in Manchester

Guests in the Charter Suite at Manchester Central received a rousing welcome from Stockport and Stalybridge-based choir, ‘Do Your Thing’, while the after-dinner speaker, Peter McDonald, gave a fascinating and highly amusing account of some of his more interesting experiences and interactions with both patients and clinical colleagues working as a consultant general surgeon. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports. 

Once guests were seated, IHEEM’s President, Ian Hinitt, thanked members of the local community choir, ‘Do Your Thing’ – singing at the Awards Dinner for the second successive year – for their passionate performance, and extended a ‘special welcome’ to dinner guests, and especially international delegates and their partners attending Healthcare Estates 2019 through their International Federation of Healthcare Engineering ‘connections’. While the dinner was originally scheduled to take place at the city’s Principal Hotel, Ian Hinitt explained that, due to ‘infrastructure issues’ there, a late switch of venue to Manchester Central’s Charter Suite had been necessary. He thanked the event sponsors – Bender, Engie, SPIE , Rockfon, Troup Bywaters + Anders, BAM Construction, Kore Systems, and Inenco – for supporting the dinner, and paid tribute to the work of both the Step Exhibitions team and staff at Manchester Central for coordinating the holding of the biggest ever IHEEM annual awards dinner at the conference and exhibition centre with just a few days’ notice.

The IHEEM President then asked guests to give their full attention to a short presentation by Ben Bowden, a senior Regional Fundraising manager at Centrepoint, the youth homeless charity, which was selected by the Institute as the charity for the 2019 Awards Dinner. As he introduced Ben Bowden, Ian Hinitt put the importance of Centrepoint’s work into context by explaining that in 2018, 726 people died in England and Wales as a result of homelessness, a 25 per cent increase on 2017. He said: “Over the last 50 years, Centrepoint has been there to support thousands of homeless young people when they have nowhere else to turn.”