IHEEM AE REGISTERS
The AE should be appointed by the organisation with a brief to provide services in accordance with the relevant HTM. The professional status and role required may vary in accordance with the specialist service being supported.’ The Authorising Engineer (AE) acts as ‘External independent professional support’ to the healthcare organisation. The AE should be appointed by the organisation in accordance with the relevant HTM. Compliance should be achieved by adherence to the above.
Need for action
Dr Nick Hill covered the professional status of engineers in the UK quite comprehensively in his article in February’s HEJ, and I will not delve into this any further, except to concur with his view that ensuring the credibility of the status of Engineer at a much higher level than that currently afforded by Government and Professional Institutions requires action. IHEEM is, in fact, attempting to address the issue via the recognition of professional engineers willing to take on the mantle of ‘External independent professional support’ – as Authorising Engineer, and recently expanded the registers it holds from two (Decontamination and Medical Gases), to four, with the introduction of the Water and Electrical registers in late 2016. A Ventilation register is on the horizon. HTM 2020 and HTM 2021 were the only HTMs which required the Authorising Engineer to have Chartered Status. At that time, none of the other discipline-specific HTMs had an Authorising Engineer role defined. Subsequent iterations of discipline-specific HTMs have taken on and defined the role of the Authorising Engineer, and required for it the status of Chartered Engineer or Incorporated Engineer. With IHEEM taking the lead on producing Authorising Engineer Registers for the various disciplines, I shall leave you with the one question that has been asked by individuals, which is: ‘To afford the degree of professional independent support and respect required, should IHEEM be raising the benchmark, and should the status of the Authorising Engineer revert back to being Chartered?’
Meaning of ‘independent’ ‘The AE should remain independent of the operational structure of the healthcare organisation.’ This concept has created a great deal of confusion with PFI/private FM providers who employ their own AEs, and use them to assess, audit, and advise their own Authorised Persons within their own company. This could potentially lead to situations where the AE is pressured to authorise a potential AP who may not be competent to carry out the tasks required of him/her. Any potential for such conflict
An HV switchboard.
An HV mimic panel/board.
should be seriously considered by the healthcare facility’s management team before appointing an AE.
AE Engineer (Electrical): High Voltage (HV) and Low Voltage (LV) The reiteration and revision of the electrical HTMs in 2006 exploited the difference between High Voltage and Low Voltage installations, just as the JSP series of MOD documents did, with three documents produced for the Management of Electrical Systems in Healthcare premises: n HTM 06-01 – Electrical services Supply and Distribution - Part A, Design Considerations and Part B, Operational management. Note: This document is to be superseded by HTM 06-01 (2017), which may already be in print when you read this article. The major difference
between this new document and the old HTM is the integration of Part B into a separate chapter, and, closely following HTM 04-01, HTM 06-01 sees the introduction of the Electrical Safety Group;
n HTM 06-02 - Electrical Safety guidance for Low Voltage Systems, and,
n HTM 06-03 - Electrical Safety Guidance for High Voltage Systems.
n HTM 06-02 and 06-03 insist that the AE should remain independent of the operational structure of the healthcare organisation. The role required will vary in accordance with the specialist service being supported, either HV or LV.
IHEEM has differentiated in the AE register for both HV and LV systems, although registration in both disciplines can be achieved by individuals.
April 2017 Health Estate Journal 21
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