VENTILATION
Who is best to carry out ventilation verification?
At Healthcare Estates 2024, ventilation verification professionals, Dr Louise Webb, AE (Ventilation) of DRLC, and Gareth Twynam, managing director at AirisQ, discussed the challenges of ensuring that the air-handling plant supplying clean air to operating theatres and other critical areas is adequately monitored and managed. Here they explore the issues that annual ventilation plant checks – known as ventilation verifications – bring up, comparing and contrasting how the roles of professional ventilation verifier and Authorising Engineer (Ventilation) are positioned to ensure indoor air in healthcare premises is of the highest quality.
HTM 03-01: Specialised ventilation for healthcare premises. Part B: The management, operation, maintenance and routine testing of existing healthcare ventilation systems, recommends that air-handling units and theatre suites are checked annually using a standard checklist. The checklist for the ventilation plant is found in Appendix 1, and is titled Annual inspection of critical ventilation systems – AHU and plantroom equipment. The other area that the guidance directs attention to is found in Appendix 2 – Operating suite annual verification. This is concerned with an annual check of the fabric of the operating theatre itself, and associated rooms such as the anaesthetic room and dirty utility. HTM 03-01 does not specify who should carry out
Below left: The motor on this AHU is working, but the rubber belt that should be attached to the motor and fan is missing, meaning the unit is not functioning.
Below right: Here a surgical glove has been substituted for the borosilicate glass water trap, making this air-handling unit non- compliant.
the annual verification of critical ventilation. It would be possible, as asserted in the HEJ article, ‘A look at bringing verification in house’, (HEJ – October 2024, pages 113 to 116), to carry out the Annual Verifications using staff from the Estates Department. Dr Scott Brown’s article cites the Competent Person as the most suitable member of the Estates team to carry out this work. This article explores the situation where these annual
checks are undertaken by an ‘in-house’ CP(V), or a third party, and how the verification reports are used by the Authorising Engineer (Ventilation).
In-house or independent: which offers the best value for money? One issue for the NHS is that it has to find funding to use independent verifiers, and it could be argued that using in-house verification is better value for money for the cash-strapped service. As a service-provider to the NHS,
AirisQ aims to consistently improve its product to ensure that customers are getting the best value for money, and the most out of the service the company offers. Ensuring best value is one of key requirements that the business has to meet from both clients and potential clients. Gareth Twynam explains: “When responding to a tender, I am at pains to find out what this actually means to each NHS Trust, and how AirisQ can implement measures that will improve the Trust’s ability to read reports, digest the data, and create a format that is useful for its staff to make improvements over the course of the year.”
A specialist in the field The fact that AirisQ is a specialist in this field means that it can harness innovation and technology to aid clients’ processes, giving, say, an NHS Trust Estates & Facilities Department more time to concentrate on development, and thus improve value for money. The AE (Ventilation) gets involved with verifications in a number of ways, and in their role such individuals read many verification reports to enable them to assess the standard of the critical air- handling units in the Trust. Some clients allow Authorising Engineers to access
these reports directly from the verifiers, either via email or via online portals. Online portals are a very efficient way of getting these reports, as Authorising Engineers can see this data almost in real time. This may mean cost and time savings for the NHS, as the AE (Ventilation) then does not need to request the reports every year from the Estates Department. Authorising Engineers also benefit from using reports from a small pool of verifiers, as they can get attuned to
22 Health Estate Journal March 2025
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