WATER HYGIENE AND SAFETY Microbiologist says ‘knowledge is power’
Microbiologist, Dr Paul McDermott FRSPH, FIHEEM, an independent water safety and hygiene consultant (pictured), has an honours degree and PhD in microbiology, and spent the first 11 years of his career in microbiology research and as a university lecturer. He previously worked as a Specialist Inspector in the Health and Safety Executive’s Biological Agents Unit. In his role as a regulator, much of his time was spent working in the field of occupational Legionella risk control. Having been involved in the ‘evolution’ of the LinkThru TMU technology over the past three years, he says: “The emerging technologies that permit remote sensing and monitoring of water temperatures and outlet usage undoubtedly provide significantly more data and superior information on water system safety compared with the traditional approaches. The ability to check these important parameters in real time provides a far more detailed picture of the way a water system is functioning, and can identify issues such as infrequent use of outlets unequivocally to enable appropriate actions to be taken, e.g., proactive flushing or outlet removal. Enhanced monitoring is likely to be of greatest value in high-risk areas, e.g. hospital augmented care wards, but can also be of great value
Plugging the gaps
While it’s essential that we learn lessons from episodes such as this, the key issue to flag is that if there is a shortage of accurate data to hand, it is almost impossible to identify that water temperatures are out of range across a large-scale hospital site, which may have thousands of water system outlets to monitor. Despite its critical function, water management in large-scale hospitals and health estates has traditionally been perceived as a problem- child, approached in a fragmented, and sometimes inconsistent, way across the sector.
While healthcare estates teams are good at undertaking risk assessments and water monitoring, many large hospitals face a significant resource issue in sparing the staff to go around and take temperature readings. It’s not a lack of willingness or ability, just the sheer scale of the job when undertaken manually. Healthcare estates engineers or even designated nurses are sent to tour washrooms and turn taps on and off at well-used and under-utilised outlets, take
during commissioning and balancing of new, or altered, water systems. In these (and other) situations, the ability to appraise water flow (and usage) through a system can identify potential problems that might otherwise go unnoticed if traditional methods are used. “It has been said that
knowledge is power, and that is certainly true; knowing what the problems are, and where they are,
means that solutions can be identified and the situation remedied. However, organisations that utilise these new technologies must do so in the knowledge that once problems are identified, there is an obligation to take proportionate actions to put things right. Having systems in place to understand and utilise effectively the additional information that these novel approaches provide, and access to sufficient resource to do what is needed (both in the short and long term), are essential.”
The IoT dashboard portal can provide at-a-glance summary views of hot and cold water flow events by temperature range, across defined periods of time.
temperature readings using a probe or thermistor at sentinel points each month, or perhaps even on a weekly basis, record the data, and then email or manually input the data into whatever collation method the organisation is using, such as an electronic log-book.
Thousands of readings to sort through
Traditionally, an estates engineer recording data could have thousands of temperature readings to sort through, analyse, and, where necessary, respond to with remedial action each week. Not only
is this strategy open to human error, but inordinate amounts of time are spent by staff who could otherwise be more valuably engaged – and the whole staffing issue could worsen if we continue to see the skills gap widening as we lose resource due to Brexit. The worst case scenario of getting things wrong – in addition to time and cost – is the very real threat of Legionella outbreaks in buildings that are already housing sick and vulnerable people.
Outlet activation flow events and recorded water temperatures for hot, cold, or blended water supplies can be analysed in detail for specific times of day or night. These readings reveal that no activations have occurred between 8.30 pm and 6.30 am the following morning.
Harnessing the Internet of Things One of the latest innovations already changing how hospitals are managing water systems is an operating system comprising physical hardware connected to a cloud-based IoT portal that Cistermiser has developed. Working closely with leading software developers, our R&D team has created our intelligent temperature monitoring unit – LinkThru TMU – which delivers automatic wireless monitoring, providing real-time temperature readings on the computer screen of, say, a healthcare engineer working within a hospital’s Estates department, enabling such personnel to track and monitor hot and cold water
August 2019 Health Estate Journal 61
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