HydroChem was proud to once again sponsor the recent IHEA national conference held in Perth, Western Australia, in September 2015.
This was a fantastic 3-day event, which showcased cutting edge developments in health infrastructure and innovative solutions to the challenges that hospital engineers encounter in older facilities. The Fiona Stanley Hospital & the Perth Children’s Hospital were the stars of the show.
In this 3 part series we highlight the key takeaways.
Just as advances in technology have transformed the consumer experience, these advances are changing healthcare and associated infrastructure.
The tours of the hospitals and two days of presentations demonstrated how infrastructure can enable the efficient allocation of resources, improve the experience of patients and staff and enhance health outcomes. The integration of services with Wi-Fi connectivity throughout the Fiona Stanley Hospital enables the 80,000 service requests per month to be efficiently allocated to staff with both the right skill-set and availability to ensure a timely response.
We got to see firsthand how the call centre responds and allocates requests to either staff, an automated guided vehicle or to external contractor services. The use of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), reduce the number of occupational health and safety injuries as they are used for routine and heavy lifting tasks, such as transporting linen, and form a part of infection control as they keep clean and dirty tasks separate. We got to follow an AGV as it docked with a food trolley and went on its way to deliver meals, made fresh on site, to the ward.
In his presentation, David Hipkins of Softsols Group, went on to explain that this is only the beginning. He described a not too distant future where a patient-centric model uses technology to help the patient or health consumer “feel connected and expected”. One way that this is achieved is that the patient will receive a notification on their smart health monitor, reminding them to attend their appointment, which is in turn created in response to an anomaly in their health readings.
As they arrive for their hospital appointment they will find their reserved car park where they are met by a porter who takes them to their reserved bed. Here they are further evaluated before meeting with their clinician.
It is clear that Hospital Engineers have a massive role to play in ‘Building the future of Health’.
Quick Facts
Fiona Stanley Hospital – efficiencies through the use of technology
• 783 beds, 1500 outpatients per day, 20 wards, 4000 clinical staff, 1000 non-clinical staff
• Global service provider Serco runs and operates the non-clinical services
• 150K sensor points track movement through the hospital (Real Time Location Service)
• 65 disparate services are coordinated by IELVS*
• Agility triages and coordinates 80,000 requests
• Agility tracks all services against 480 KPIs, aligned with the Service Level Agreement
• Driven by principals of continuous improvement and operational efficiency
• Trends and data analysis enable Reliability Centred Maintenance
• Financial penalties are applied if KPIs are not met
• WA Health receive a monthly report and have full visibility of all systems
*IELVS = Integrated Extra Low Voltage System provides a common web interface for monitoring display, archiving, reporting and controlling services as well as medical equipment.
HydroChem are very proud to be providing the water treatment for Fiona Stanley Hospital. Our program incorporates world best practice water treatment, utilising VAF filtration and a high level interface controller to optimise water treatment.