Given the challenges of the past two years, it is essential that hospitals and other healthcare facilities continue to maintain a robust strategy to ensure patient safety. Here, Tony Stubbs, Business Development manager (Healthcare) at Veolia Water Technologies UK (VWT UK), explains why a consistent, pure water supply, and smart monitoring solutions, should be an integral part of that strategy.
Equipment failure or system shutdowns can cause significant issues for healthcare facilities, such as departmental closures and appointment cancellations. As the UK continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are faced with another problem: tackling long waiting lists due to the significant number of appointments that were suspended. Looking back at some telling statistics for last year, and according to NHS England, 6.35 million patients were waiting to start treatment in March 2022 – an all-time high since records began. In addition, 2.31 million patients had been waiting over 18 weeks for treatment in February 2022, while almost 300,000 had been waiting for over a year. Although it will undoubtedly take years to clear this backlog, this winter is expected to be hard on the NHS once again; thus any further delays caused by equipment or system failures could be devastating for many of the UK’s hospitals and the health of their patients
Importance of a pure supply
A consistent supply of pure water is a necessity for many areas within a healthcare facility. For example, there has been a severe backlog in endoscopy appointments as a result of the pandemic. With many of those waiting for appointments being cancer patients, it is essential to prevent any unforeseen downtime in the water supply to the washers, as this will lead to yet more delays. The same can be said for decontamination and sterile services, laboratories, and renal departments. They also require pure water. Renal dialysis is a critical and life-saving procedure, which is required by patients at regular intervals each week. It is therefore vital that there is a reliable supply of pure water to the renal dialysis equipment.
Any pure water supplied must comply with relevant ISO standards – ISO 23500 for renal procedures, and ISO 15833 for decontamination services. Healthcare facilities must also adhere to the relevant Health Technical Memoranda, which give comprehensive guidance to ensure that the very best levels of healthcare are delivered to patients
Need for robustness
With close monitoring of these parameters being critical, pure water technologies and monitoring equipment must be robust. With this in mind, healthcare facilities can take advantage of smart solutions that allow site operators to monitor the production of pure water, and implement operational strategies in line with day-today concerns. Often, these flexible digital monitoring systems are scalable, and can be implemented on a range of water technologies, from a single dialysis unit, to a complete pure water system network.
Smart solutions can enable operators to address specific water optimisation needs and respond to challenges throughout the water cycle. With 24/7 access to secure web portals, and customisable interfaces to suit all users, an uninterrupted supply of pure water can be guaranteed. These solutions also allow operators to manage and optimise the supply, in turn reducing production costs while maintaining the highest quality of water required.
Making more accurate decisions
In addition to this, healthcare facilities can make more accurate decisions about their water treatment equipment. Users can access a digital library of relevant documents, including service reports, contracts, and orders, while data visualisation is used to collect and display process data from equipment. In addition, operators can also receive notifications and alarms in the event of faults, which enables proactive intervention and avoids unexpected shutdowns. Furthermore, automatic reporting can provide healthcare facilities with consistent and regular data analysis, as well as maintenance modules that give an overview of the tasks requiring attention, and their level of urgency
Finally, selecting a smart digital solution from a water technology expert can provide significant added value through the support available from its service teams. Remote monitoring can enable these teams to check the equipment’s water quality, alert the healthcare facility, or even dispatch service personnel to resolve the issue if required. Service teams are on hand to troubleshoot problems and resolve any issues at the earliest stage possible. There are smart digital monitoring services available that provide all of these benefits, such as Hubgrade from Veolia Water Technologies UK.
Halton General Hospital, Warrington, England
As a recent example, Hubgrade was able to rectify a water system breakdown in the endoscopy department at Halton General Hospital. The hospital’s reverse osmosis water treatment system had provided reliable, efficient performance for the washers in the facility since its installation in 2019. However, following a sudden change to the hospital’s water supply, where microbial levels dropped below what the system had been initially programmed to recognise, it was unable to function – preventing any supply of water.
With Hubgrade in place, the service team was able to utilise remote access to the hospital’s portal dashboard and identify the issue, before recommending an effective remedy to the on-site technicians. As a result, Halton General Hospital was able to get the system back up and running within 30 minutes. The use of Hubgrade mitigated the potential for on-site disruption, which could have adversely affected the hospital’s patients and staff. In fact, it is estimated that without a smart monitoring solution, the facility would have lost crucial access to its washer systems for 24 hours while a service engineer was dispatched to site
Ras Al Khaimah Hospital, UAE
A further good example of the system’s benefits can be found at Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) Hospital, a multi-speciality healthcare facility located in the United Arab Emirates. As the hospital has a series of clinical chemistry units that operate ‘24/7’, it is essential that a consistent supply of pure water is maintained. The hospital’s critical analysers are fed by two ELGA Medica Pro 6 RO units that have been equipped with Hubgrade for data visualisation and performance alerts – ensuring that consistency is maintained.
Through the use of Hubgrade, the service team can remotely monitor RAK Hospital’s water quality so that if its water resistivity decreases, engineers can immediately travel to the facility and replace the consumable, restoring the supply of pure water without any impact on the hospital’s operations. Illustrating the system’s in-use benefits – since its installation, Hubgrade has been able to alert the service team that the feedwater to the ELGA units had stopped. Using this information, the RAK Hospital team was able to troubleshoot the problem and recover the supply of feedwater before the facility’s water storage was depleted.
Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Gateshead, England
Following a site-wide power disruption in the early hours of the morning, Queen Elizabeth Hospital was unable to process pure water for the Osiris reverse osmosis system in its Endoscopy Department. With onsite engineers struggling to determine the cause of the fault, and an engineer unable to make a site visit for several hours, this would have led to the cancellation of all scheduled patient procedures. However, with Hubgrade digital monitoring in place at the facility, the service team was able to analyse the performance data from the Osiris system and establish the repair options with the onsite team. Through a series of valve movements and temporary system programme changes, the pure water supply to the Endoscopy Department was restored in under an hour, in turn preventing any critical patient procedures from being cancelled.
It is clear that adopting smart monitoring solutions can help healthcare facilities optimise their pure water systems and prompt preventative maintenance – avoiding system downtime. Furthermore, site operators and healthcare workers can rest assured that they will have a seamless supply of high purity water available at all times – crucial at a time when the healthcare system is under more pressure than ever before.
Tony Stubbs
Tony Stubbs has over 25 years’ experience in industrial water treatment systems from a number of market sectors. After joining the Royal Navy and studying marine engineering, he spent 15 years serving on nuclear submarines, where he specialised in technology very similar to industrial water treatment processes. Following this, he entered the water treatment sector, and eventually moved to Biochemica, where he became the director of Water Treatment Services. When Biochemica merged with VWT in 2020, he moved into a Technical manager role and assisted with system specification, before taking on the challenge of his current position – Business Development manager (Healthcare) at Veolia Water Technologies UK