REPAIR AND REMEDIATION
he explained, the team undertakes around 70,000 inspections annually. He said: “That then led to a series of challenges – for instance around infection prevention risk, with us carrying pieces of paper from one ward, and one room, to another. We also have health and safety issues around accessing the soffit of the planks with step-ladders, carrying boards, holding huge reams of paper, and trying to keep it all in order.” With around RAAC 500 panels per department, this
work proven a considerable logistical challenge. Richard Burgin explained: “We had storage and sustainability issues linked to the use of paper and record-keeping for the audit trail, and then realised the information was all being double handled. The survey team was going out completing the inspections, with the data brought back and passed to an administrative function to be uploaded onto Excel – the format we were using to keep the spreadsheets.”
An ‘emerging field of understanding’ With 50 separate Excel sheets, and 20,000 lines of data, it had then become ‘hugely time-consuming’ to update after any changes in guidance. ”We are also operating in an emerging field of understanding around RAAC as a material, so any change in guidance meant reconfiguring the entire system, changing the ratings of everything manually, and then going out and re-inspecting,” Richard Burgin explained. “That made us realise we needed to change the way we were doing this, and we looked to digitise the process. We contacted a company called BIS Consult and set about digitising our inspection and monitoring process.” Here he showed a slide incorporating a pictogram of the existing process at the top, and the the new process at the bottom. He further explained: “We developed this process map to see where to identify the pain points in the existing system, and how we could rectify that, and indeed add to the process flow using the digital process. Essentially – as you can see in the middle – we know we’ve achieved a 50% efficiency saving in two full-time equivalents in the administrative function. That provides the return on investment for investing in the digital solution.”
The benefits of ‘going digital’ Moving to ‘the outcomes and benefits of going digital’, Richard Burgin said – illustrating his point via slides: “So, we’ve got the efficiency, it’s all done live, using GPS, cloud-based technology, and iPads. As a panel risk rating changes, it updates live, and changes the dashboard and the metrics. We have the resilience of it all just working. It also sits on the clinical Wi-Fi, and we’re not relying on pieces of paper, having the inspection packs put together and processed, to then be taken out, disassembled, filled in, and then reprocessed. It’s all just touch and tap on the iPad, and a fully audited process.” Every inspection is date and time stamped, with a full log of who has undertaken the work, Richard Burgin explained, which also assists reporting. He said: “The system acts as a single source of truth, so we can configure that metric to report any different parameters. We know exactly how many of the highest risk planks we’ve got, and how many we have no risk evident in, the total number of planks; and all such data. It’s very useful for that reporting function and indeed – given how it operates – given access to it, external stakeholders can come into the system on a ‘view only’ license, and take all the information out for themselves. We thus don’t have to provide NHS England with updates; they can take the data out for themselves.” From a health and safety standpoint, meanwhile, with
the system GPS-based, Estates management personnel know where the operatives are, and whether they are lone working. Richard Burgin said: “It’s also a really useful health and safety tool in terms of translating that risk onto the roof. These are the new capabilities we were developing previously. While it was all paper-based and on Excel, now it’s digital and updates live, and we have connectivity across the estate.” He continued: “We can see who’s logged on, and change the profiles at will. Previously, we had to update all that manually, but it now updates itself. If we have a change in guidance, we can feed the data into the software, and it then changes all the risk profiles.” Touching next on data analytics, Richard Burgin
explained, using a slide: “The third image there is the dashboard based on the infographics from the NHS guidance document produced by Mott MacDonald; it’s really straightforward and easy to read, and you can see the risk at a glance. That’s great for communicating out to external stakeholders, in particular, who may not be as interested in RAAC as I am. It’s really powerful messaging. You can see it at glance – the biggest estate in the NHS captured on one screen of information.” The final image Richard Burgin showed was of the roof access tool, where the Trust team has taken high-resolution drone survey imagery and overlaid its roof layer of RAAC risk. When operatives are working on the roof, the system can tell them when they are about to stand on a high risk plank – locating them using geo-gate technology – and informing them they’re about to enter a high risk area. He explained: “This is really important part of our strategy moving forward with PPMs; we’ve so much of our electrical infrastructure on the roof. It’s an essential piece of health and safety kit for us, and also helps with extreme weather inspections. We can plot rainfall, see ponding on
Following the initial survey in 2019, surveying and monitoring of all the roof and floor planks at Airedale General has been ongoing since 2021. A ‘Hierarchy of Defects’ and RAAC Strategy determine the frequency of inspection based on risk.
From 2019 until 2022 the Trust’s system of inspection had been supported by a paper-based approach, with printing out of the existing asset drawings, which were then marked up, with a fully numbered panel drawing produced of each of the 50 departments.
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