THE HOSPITAL

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 25, 29 July 1939, Page 10

THE HOSPITAL

REBUILDING SCHEME

A START MADE

INTEW BOILER-HOUSE

•? The completion of the foundations, fand the steadily growing fabricated skeleton of a boiler-house, on a site to the south of the Wellington Hospital, are the first visible signs of the commencement of the Wellington Hospital Board's £750,000 rebuilding scheme. Close to the boiler-house site, and adjacent to the old match factory build±j *, concrete piles are re- dy to be driven to provide for the foundations of the hospital stores block. At this week's meeting of the Hospital Board a tender was accepted for the pile driving in connection with the new Nurses' Home, and it is hcpec. in the near future to start excavating for the new acute block. The rebuilding scheme is complicated by the fact that the board had to give an undertaking that while the work was in progress the .mciency of the hospital would in no waj be impaired. This will present the architects and contractors with some delicate problems in the transfer of plant and machinery. -The new boiler-house is a £60,000 job; the new stores block is to cost £28,000; the acute block, £400,000; and an emergency ward, £13,900. In addition, alterations are being made to the existing children's operating theatres, : and an additional theatre is being pro.cyided, to cost £4500. The emergency ward,-which is situated nea* the Children's Hospital, is almost complete. It is being built primarily to relieve the congestion, and to some extent to meet ihe demand for accommodation before the: acute block is finished. It will provide for 50 beds. STEAM IS LIFE. To the average layman the word boiler-house probably conveys little. In a vague sort of way he links it up with provision of hot water and lets it go at that. Such a prosaic thing as a boiler-house does not capture his imagination in the same manner as does an operating theatre or a large hospital ward, yet the boiler-house of any hospital, and particularly of a •metropolitan hospital, is a most essential part of the institution. The function of a boiler-house is to produce steam, and in a hospital steam means life. From the huge coal-fired furnaces steam under pressure is distributed and used in every part of the hospital. -It means life when a steam-tent is used to perform certain operations, particularlyon children, and it means life in the provision of sterile water and in the sterilisation of instruments and dressings. . The average householder realises what hot water means in the home: in a hospital it means more. In the preparation of food, steam is all important, and under pressure it is forced into the containers in the food wagons which keep the food hot after they leave the kitchen on their long journey through the wards. ' Steam washes -and dries the laundry of patients, the staff, of outside institutions controlled by the hospital, and it disinfects. It sterilises instruments and dressings; it heats wards, corridors, and homes; it gives vacuum drainage in "the operating theatres and the wards; it drives the emergency electrical equipment; it provides compression for the free2ing chambers and for the making of ice. In fact, there is probably nothing done in the hospital which in some way or another is not connected with steam. At a rough estimate, every patient in hospital requires about 201bs of steam, that is, from a pressure point of view. The new boiler-house will provide about 25001bs of steam per hour, compared with the present output of 14001bs. At present the Ewart and Fever Hospitals provide their own steam from small plants, but it, is planned to extend steam to those institutions from the new hospital when it is completed. INCREASED PLANT. The new boiler-house will contain five boilers. Two will be new boilers, and three of the four boilers now in use will be removed to the new building. During this shift there must be no diminution of the steam supply. The new boilers will be * stoked mechanically» and will have an ashhandling plant, and everything is being planned to produce an efficient, unit with labour-saving devices so that for the twenty-four hours of every day this key service might operate without interruption.