BSEE SEPTEMBER 2011 TM
New HVCA Chief Executive, Blane Judd, has been appointed a fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute, in recognition of his contribution to training and education in building engineering services. A graduate in integrated engineering from Nottingham Trent University, Mr Judd has demonstrated a career-long commitment to the development of qualifications and the raising of standards across building engineering services – as a director of sector skill council SummitSkills and of the
BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER The authoritative voice of the industry
Chief Executive awarded fellowship INSIDE THIS MONTH: The smart money is on
Electricity Association, as chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Plumbing and Heating Engineering and as an executive board member of the World Plumbing Council.
International relationship
Mr Judd has also served as a member of the Senate of the Engineering Council and the Board for Engineering Regulation, as chairman of Ongar Town Council and as an Epping Forest District Councillor. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary fellowship by the Indian Plumbing Association for his international promotion of the relationship between public health and good sanitation. Blane Judd joined the HVCA as Chief
Executive designate in June, and succeeded Robert Higgs as Chief Executive on 25 July 2011. Commenting on his new role, Mr Judd acknowledged that a significant wind of change was blowing through the sector and the wider
construction industry. He said: “It is important, therefore, that the services the Association delivers to its members fully meet their current and future requirements.”
Sustainable environment “The requirement to create a low-carbon economy, and the resulting quest for a truly sustainable built environment, was providing massive opportunities for the sector – most significantly in the design and installation of renewable technologies, and their integration into overall building systems. Our members are well-placed to be in the forefront of this technical revolution. “We must do everything in our power to ensure that they gain maximum commercial advantage from initiatives such as Feed-in Tariffs, the Green Deal and the Renewable Heat Incentive, and that other, less expert and less reputable interests do not encroach on territory that truly belongs to us,” Mr Judd concluded.
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What about the air that we breathe?
Air quality appears to have been virtually ignored in the latest guidelines from The British Standards Institute which has launched its Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 5748 to provide a framework for the planning, application and measurement of cleanliness in hospitals.
Cosmetic cleaning of the outside of
ventilation grills may look nice but it does not address the very serious, and in some cases fatal, consequences of contaminated air ducts.
Control infection
The warning comes from Ian Wall, a director of Ductbusters, who says: “All initiatives to improve and measure hospital hygiene are clearly to be welcomed however we believe it is a major cause for concern that in such a lengthy and detailed document, the issue of
duct cleaning has barely been touched upon. Any medical facility can have the most sparkling floors, surfaces and equipment imaginable, but if the ventilation ducts are not clean infection will spread.”
Facing challenges
“The challenge hospitals face is that highly infectious diseases like MRSA and Clostridium difficile are not only carried through ventilation systems, but can thrive and feed on flakes of dead dry human skin which is a large component of hospital dust and can build up in ventilation ducts. So however diligent healthcare teams are in cleaning surfaces and equipment within the building, if ducts are not regularly cleaned, the impact on controlling infection of these efforts will be considerably diminished.” Dr Ghasson Shabha, a facilities
management MSc course leader at the School of Property, Construction and Planning at Birmingham City University and an MRSA project co-coordinator agrees there is a real and urgent need to make regular duct cleaning an essential part of sustained hospital cleaning and maintenance programmes.
Regular cleaning
He said: “MRSA has increasingly become one of the major sources of healthcare- associated infection in hospitals in Britain and a main contributory factor to 100,000 cases per annum. Ducts in hospitals, depending on type and function of rooms, should be cleaned on a three to six monthly basis and filters should be replaced on a regular basis as part of planned preventive maintenance programme.”
For those involved in the growing solar panel sector‚ awareness of installation and safety standards is crucial for system performance‚ says Jim Wallace of Seaward Solar.
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Door entry is a multi-billion dollar world- wide industry that has technology
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Professional Macerators and Pumps
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