HOSPITAL CATERING
Modular kitchens are able to ‘transform’ catering options
In a world of shrinking budgets, with clinical needs the priority for all hospitals, catering may drop down the pecking order, even though it is a statutory requirement for healthcare facilities to provide food for patients and staff. Against a backdrop where funds are tight, Lee Vines, chief executive at PKL, a leading UK modular kitchen infrastructure specialist, gives his standpoint on how a modular kitchen can ‘transform catering options’ for many hospitals, both temporarily during refurbishments, or permanently through a bespoke modular kitchen.
Many NHS hospitals are facing a significant funding shortfall in their catering infrastructure. Budget cuts, increased demand, and ageing equipment that is prone to breakdowns and increasingly not fit for purpose, are all putting pressure on hospital finances. Installing a permanent kitchen within your hospital buildings presents a number of problems for estates managers – they are expensive to install, expensive to maintain, and expensive to replace, add significant fire risk to your estate, and are inflexible if your requirements significantly change. The required installation work can also cause major disruption if the kitchen is at the heart of a health complex, or near to patient accommodation. Increasingly, offsite modular construction is becoming the preferred option for replacing and augmenting many facilities. The recent creation of the NHS Shared Business Services Modular Framework, on which PKL was delighted to be included as modular kitchen facility specialists, showed its acceptance.
It is easy to see why offsite modular construction is becoming more popular – it is cost-effective, innovative, and often makes efficient use of large, unutilised outside spaces. Hospital estates managers are used to meeting stringent
and challenging legal requirements on their facilities: modular operating theatres and MRI scanners are commonplace. However, catering infrastructure presents separate and distinct challenges that require a different type of expertise: air extraction, food safety legislation, fire safety requirements, and specific solutions to make the dangerous kitchen environment safer.
Supporting the service during refurbishment
A temporary modular kitchen facility can support your catering service while your main catering facilities are being refurbished, or if there is an emergency. A temporary solution can reduce disruption while catering facilities are inoperable, and can bring down the additional cost burden on catering operations by maintaining service levels. Permanent modular solutions can present a cost-effective way of boosting your catering facilities, in a way which is easy to project manage due to its fixed production schedules, and easy to budget for thanks to fixed monthly costs or a fixed project fee. In the following sections I will outline how different types of modular solution might help your healthcare site.
PKL CEO, Lee Vines: “Modular kitchens and concessions can help health estates teams reconsider their catering options and boost incomes, by putting their catering services where they are needed, not just where they have traditionally been.”
Refurbishments – temporary facilities As regulations change and become more stringent, old kitchen infrastructure creates headaches for estates managers, making it harder and harder for older estates to keep pace.
When tiles are falling off the wall, the floor needs replacing, or your extraction is not up to code, kitchens quickly go from being an asset to a liability. This makes changes more complicated, and sometimes impossible, without a full shutdown of the catering facilities on site. This presents a bigger problem – how to refurbish existing kitchen estate without interrupting provision or significantly reducing service?
The recent installation of a Podules retail unit in a London hospital.
Do you refurbish your kitchen facilities in phases, or in one go? With a phased project the disruption will often last much longer. Each section needs to be emptied, shut off from the rest of the kitchen, and refurbished, before equipment is
October 2018 Health Estate Journal 81
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116