CARBON AND EMISSION REDUCTION
Sensor-based monitoring paying off at St George’s
As one of the largest real estate owners in the UK, the NHS is under pressure to optimise its assets’ health and reduce its carbon footprint. Like many NHS facilities, St George’s Hospital in south London must deliver adequate clinical services, efficiently. After securing sustainability funds, the hospital’s team enlisted multiple specialists to help it improve consumption and asset performance. Dave Lister, a Healthcare Solutions specialist at monitoring solutions integrator, IAconnects, explains how the hospital embraced environmental monitoring.
Located in Tooting, St George’s Hospital dates back over 200 years. It opened its doors as a 60-bed hospital at Hyde Park Corner in 1733, and was rebuilt in 1820, offering over 300 beds. To help meet a growing demand, a new convalescent hospital was eventually built in Wimbledon, and a new medical school, now known as St George’s, University of London, was established on the St George’s Hospital site in 1868.1
The University moved
to its current site in Tooting in 1976, and was followed by the hospital, which finally closed its Hyde Park Corner site in 1980. Each year, over 130,000 operations are performed at
St George’s Hospital on patients from across the South of England in its state-of-the-art operating theatres. It has 31 theatres, including seven cardiac and neurosurgery theatres in its Atkinson Morley Wing. Here, over 4,000 of the most complex neurosurgical and cardiothoracic procedures are undertaken each year.2
The need for monitoring Operating theatres are large energy consumers, accounting for a high proportion of hospitals’ carbon footprint. According to the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change (UKHACC), they are three to six times more energy-intensive than clinical wards.3
Most theatre
energy consumption relates to maintenance, such as of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC). Meanwhile, lighting and medical equipment such as anaesthetic gas scavenging systems (AGSSs) are also high sources of consumption. An operating theatre’s environmental conditions can influence the clinical process and a hospital’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. For example, temperature, humidity, CO2
, and occupancy, are all influential factors. In recent years, the NHS has begun to embrace
the expertise available from small- and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly when implementing strategies to digitally enable its estate. This includes seeking the specialist services needed to safely extract data sources from legacy systems. St George’s competed with several organisations for sustainability funding from its local authority. Eventually, it won the entire allocation after submitting a project based on its ‘smart’ theatres. The team wanted to capture all the available data from 31 operating theatres across St George’s, and augment any missing data sets by adding control and monitoring devices where required. Although the scheme was largely supported by SW London
May 2025 Health Estate Journal 73
ICB green funding, it was driven by NHS Estates and supported by NHS England. Meanwhile, IAconnects had been chosen by a team
working on behalf of the NHS, led by academics from Loughborough University, to provide condition monitoring and digital advisory services to a research programme looking at hospitals affected by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). As well as supplying and testing automated condition monitoring device options, we needed to understand how existing data sources could be collected, aggregated, and channelled, into academic research programmes. After an 18-month engagement, our involvement with the programme was complete, having contributed significantly to stakeholders’ understanding of the risks associated with RAAC and possible management tools. The NHS followed this successful project delivery,
which was achieved thanks to a specialist partner eco- system. Subsequently, it chose us to provide data capture, aggregation, and dissemination services to St George’s as part of its recently-funded smart theatres project.
Getting started Having been recruited for the smart theatres project, we started by spreading the project across several domain experts, which included Siemsatech, a BMS specialist,
In all, St George’s Hospital in Tooting has 31 theatres, including seven cardiac and neurosurgery theatres in its Atkinson Morley Wing.
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