MEDICAL GAS PIPELINE SYSTEMS
a team of about 10, who on some days worked an 18-hour shift in tandem with the Trust’s Estates team to get the scheme completed promptly.
Two compressors for added resilience
“An oxygen concentrator uses a compressor to manufacture air, and the air is then sieved for the oxygen, “Stafford Scopes explained. “To produce this air, you need an air compressor, and a refrigerant dryer to cool the air. However, there was only enough power – a 100 A supply – on site to run one air compressor. We wanted two compressors available, so that in the event of one failing, the system would switch to the other. We thus adapted our existing Empower control panel to be able to change duty between two machines to ensure that one compressor is powered down before the other one starts up.”
Figure 2: A sketch plan of the configuration of the new plant within the hospital.
busy that we decided we were only going to support our existing clients. Shane King, the Trust’s head of Estates Operations – with whom we have a long- standing relationship – needed a lot of medical gas infrastructure reinforcement to ensure adequate oxygen flow rates and pressure at newly designated ICU beds, and SHJ just didn’t have the resources to do it. Shane’s response was that we should go out and get them, so we did – harnessing the services of sub-contractors, who, under our Competent Person guidance, supported SHJ with the installation of the plant and pipework.”
An enthusiastic project lead Stafford Scopes was keen to highlight how enthusiastically Shane King had led what proved a complex engineering project right from the start. He said: “It was Shane who asked: ‘We don’t have enough oxygen; how are we going to address the issue?’ There is, of course,
a limit to what a VIE and the vaporisers can supply, and, keen not to exceed the limit, Shane asked us what we could suggest. Our ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking was to supply an oxygen concentrator.” Normally, largely because the performance of large oxygen concentrators is impacted by ambient temperature, standard practice would be to install such plant in a hospital plant room. However, at Charing Cross Hospital, a lack of space made this impractical. “In fact,” Stafford Scopes explained, “as there was no such space available here, we obtained two 40 foot shipping containers from a company that can adapt them, Adaptainer, who Shane suggested.” With the local roads quiet in late March, not long after the national lockdown, getting the plant, and indeed the specially fabricated containers that house them, onto site, using cranes, did not prove too much of a challenge. Stafford Scopes explained: “We undertook what proved a quite demanding project ourselves, using
Stafford Scopes explained that the project team also had to deal with a significant unexpected obstacle when the shipping containers and concentrator arrived. He said: “On examining the concentrator, we soon realised that the measurements we had for it gave the height when it was lying horizontal, rather than vertical. To address this, we cut an aperture into the roof of the first container, craned the oxygen concentrator in through the roof, and then located the second container onto the top, to weatherproof it all.”
Four weeks from start to finish To ensure that the system would be resilient, SHJ ran a new medical gas main from the existing VIE to the generator – a distance of about 100 metres – and installed a cylinder manifold, so that if the supply from the concentrator failed, the hospital could run on cylinders. From agreement on the plan to the completion of all the works took only four weeks, Stafford Scopes explained, necessitating some very long days on site for some personnel. He said: “The team was absolutely excellent in terms of its
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October 2020 Health Estate Journal 41
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