Wharfedale Hospital, West Yorkshire

The challenge: delivering sustainable local healthcare, focused on patients

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) has a clear vision across its seven West Yorkshire sites: to provide “patient-centred, fair, collaborative, accountable and empowered” services and facilities.

The Wharfedale Hospital was purposely designed and built to reflect this ethos. At the construction stage, BAM made sure the materials used were robust and easy to source, for cost-efficient maintenance. And the facilities management teams built a 3D Building Information Model to manage all the Hospital’s 4,000+ assets that need servicing and maintenance.

The recent strategic developments on the site – the new elective care hub and the solar canopy – have also been driven by the LTHT’s vision.

For the Trust as a whole, it’s not just about providing great front-line patient care. Sustainability underpins everything. The organisation is determined to rely less and less on conventional energy, to shrink its carbon footprint and make sure its finite resources are wisely spent. 

BAM solutions: innovation, digitisation and automation

The £1.1 million solar installation at the Wharfedale is a great example of a pragmatic solution that harnessed an untapped opportunity: the car park.

The Hospital is on a constrained site – surrounded by houses on three sides and a road on the fourth – so parking is at a premium. The solution was to raise a photovoltaic canopy over the entire area. Patients, staff and visitors still have the same available space, with the added benefits of shade in summer and shelter in bad weather. 

The BAM FM team is constantly looking for other ways to minimise energy consumption, while maintaining a safe and clean environment for patients and staff. 

For instance, they fitted sensors in the operating theatres linked to the building management system: to optimise heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) in these vital areas. If a theatre isn’t occupied for one hour, ventilation is automatically cut by 50%. The HVAC systems shut down completely at night and weekends. 

A quick restart sequence is programmed into the building management system, to switch the ventilation back on in an emergency. 

When it comes to on-going maintenance and condition surveys, the team uses an iPad to access all the essential data it needs on location, fill in checklists quickly and efficiently, and see what work has been completed in the past. 

The results: measurable savings and a cleaner future

The solar canopy alone is saving around £75,000 a year, as well as cutting carbon emissions by almost 44 tonnes. The Hospital generates enough electricity to power 60 households and draws 15% less power from the grid.

In the operating theatres, BAM’s innovations have cut electricity use by 28%, delivering yearly savings of 13,600 kWh and six tons of CO2 emissions.

These projects are just the first steps in the Wharfedale’s long-term plan to develop its services and cut carbon emissions. They will be funded by grants from the government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, and the BAM team has been working closely with the Trust to secure these bids.

And in terms of maintenance, the BAM FM teams are now carrying out reactive jobs 45% faster and completing more than twice as many planned maintenance jobs every month.