County Hospital, Stafford – Fire Damper Testing

Introduction
The County Hospital is located in Stafford and is one of two hospitals within the University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust. The Trust provides general hospital services for almost 1 million people and specialised services for around 3 million people.

The Challenge
The big challenge that Hydro-X faced with this particular job was accessing the Fire Dampers, as they needed to be tested without disrupting the patients and staff. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it restricted the available areas of the hospital. This was because of the significant increase in the number of hospital patients, and the added pressure on the staff as the January 2021 admissions peak occurred while we were on site.

The Solution
With hospital sites in particular, Hydro-X recognises that we have a duty of care to the patients, NHS employees, and our own staff. The account manager for this project arranged weekly updates with the responsible person at the County Hospital and engineers would also have meetings each day to provide a daily report sheet whilst also updating our live fire damper tracker. While on site, the engineers made sure to strictly adhere to all the relevant hospital protocols and were able to change their working patterns in order to adapt to the ever-increasing pressures that the hospital faced while we were on site.

The adaptability of our engineers was noted and appreciated by Mark, who was the site contact. You can read his recommendation, as well as some of the others we have received, on the testimonials section of our website.

Value Added
Our engineers were not only flexible, but also displayed brilliant communication when dealing with the Hospital’s estates team as they noticed some discrepancies in previous work that had been completed in relation to the locations of some assets. The team were able to identify all the fire dampers and updated the live tracker. The live tracker can also be downloaded into Excel format to become the new asset list for the building. Hydro-X are also in the process of quoting the remedial works for the fire dampers to ensure the hospital maintain their compliance with the latest fire and air safety regulations.