INSTITUTE NEWS


‘Revitalised’ Irish branch keen to grow its membership


Last month’s joint IHEEM Northern Irish and Republic of Ireland Branch event, held at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium, and titled ‘Delivering sustainable healthcare estates’, had taken many months of planning, and close collaboration between the two Branches and the Institute’s Head Office team, to arrange. It was also, HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from the Chair of the ROI Branch, Bill O’Reilly, when he spoke to him in April prior to the event, the latest milestone in the revitalisation of the Branch following a two-year period when activities were interrupted by the pandemic.


Speaking to me via by ‘Teams’ on 13 April, Bill O’Reilly FIHEEM began by telling me a little about his own professional background – he is a healthcare engineer by training, having originally qualified in Building Services Engineering at Technological University Dublin (TUD), and obtained Level 9 postgraduate diplomas in Fire Safety Engineering and Sustainable Energy, and an MSc in Management from Trinity College Dublin. Prior to the start of his career in healthcare – he joined the sector as Technical Services Manager at Ireland’s largest acute academic teaching hospital – St James’s Hospital Dublin – in March 1993, he had gained nine years’ wide- ranging mechanical, electrical, and building services engineering experience at a number of private sector companies. He said: “My move into the healthcare


sector at the 900-bedded St James’s Hospital was purely coincidental. I subsequently spent 12 and a half years there as Technical Services Manager, responsible for areas including Projects, Building Maintenance, Energy Management, Fire Safety, and Facilities. During this period the hospital doubled in size, with a €500 m investment from Ireland’s Department of Health seeing it transformed from an ageing healthcare facility to a modern acute hospital.”


Current Estates Manager role He moved to his current role – as Estates Manager at the Connolly Hospital in West Dublin – in October 2005, on arrival there creating and developing the Estates function, since at the time there was no Department to fulfil this role. Bill O’Reilly said: “The Estates function encompasses activities including New Building Projects, Building Maintenance, Sustainable Energy Management, Fire Safety Engineering, Health & Safety, and Facilities activities – including grounds and landscape maintenance and waste management.” The ROI branch Chair said he had first became aware of IHEEM after seeing and reading a copy of HEJ. He explained: “Having seen the subject matter, and understood IHEEM’s aims and areas of activity, I decided to join. Soon after I got involved, I went to a meeting where we discussed the fact that the Branch wasn’t doing very well, and didn’t have


12 Health Estate Journal June 2022


The Connolly Hospital in West Dublin, where ROI Branch Chair, Bill O’Reilly, is based.


many members. The meeting, in Dublin, was in fact conducted by the Northern Irish Branch, and I was one of just two ROI Branch members there. I was elected temporary chair of the Branch. While the ROI Branch had some members back then, the numbers had dwindled, and the Branch wasn’t very active. The first step we took was to organise a Branch meeting, and I was very lucky that some people working in the industry – although not many from the public sector – were keen to get involved. We decided we would initially focus primarily on education and training, and our technical events became a path for us to generate interest from other people. I knew healthcare engineering was a highly specialist field, so we decided that the best way to secure interest was to discuss the technical aspects of engineering in the health service. That seemed to generate considerable support; our first technical event, at Dublin’s Crowne Plaza Hotel about 10 years ago, was on electrical engineering, and saw about 100 people attend.”


Attracting a good audience Bill O’Reilly explained that most of the attendees were not in fact IHEEM members, and I wondered how he and his Branch colleagues had managed to secure such good numbers. He said: “I’ve always maintained that although committing to a Branch role may be difficult for extremely busy healthcare engineering and estate management personnel, most such professionals are keen to progress their career. They will


thus attend events if they believe the subject matter is of interest, and there is a good speaker line-up. These factors are a big draw for healthcare engineers from both the public and private sectors in Ireland. We thus focused on making them technical, topical, and non-salesy – the emphasis firmly being on making them educational. People could see that, so we had quite lot of repeat attendees.” From the initial technical meeting, activity grew, culminating in the ROI Branch moving to hold 4-5 such meetings annually, although Bill Reilly said the COVID pandemic had ‘very much upset that’. He added: “We did hold some very successful ‘virtual’ presentations during the pandemic, however.”


‘Word of mouth’ I asked how the Branch had increased NHS attendee numbers at the meetings over the years. He said: “Mostly by word of mouth. A major additional boost was that the then Head of HSE Estates, Jim Curran, who has just retired, was very supportive of the concept of Irish healthcare engineers having a professional institute that they could draw upon to share knowledge and information. He was an IHEEM member, and, importantly for us, was the National Director of HSE Estates, and whenever we were holding technical events, Jim would receive a copy of the flyer. He then sent it to all his employees, and with it coming from him, staff would see the events as something of value. Equally, if they needed time off during the week to attend – many of our events were in


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