Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, is a specialist centre for plastic, maxillofacial and reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, helping people who have been injured or disfigured through accidents or disease.
The hospital has recently undertaken a major redevelopment of its surgical facilities, creating ten new theatres within a new purpose-designed unit. Within the facility the clinical team had a number of specific requirements based upon the type of surgery undertaken. One was to employ operating lights with outstanding performance. Mr Asit Khandwala, consultant plastic surgeon, explains: “The hospital specialises in micro, plastic, and maxillofacial surgeries and requires extremely efficient, bright, shadowless and cool lights to facilitate very fine surgery.” The nature of complex reconstructive surgery carried out at East Grinstead can see operations regularly lasting many hours, often with multi-surgeon teams. This level of surgery demands that the surgeons’ view is maximised and eye strain minimised. Decent light is not just a preference but becomes mandatory for long operations. Inferior lights can leave a surgeon struggling to identify structures and sites of bleeding. Blood is a great absorber of the visible spectrum, so lights need to be able to combat this difficult environment and maintain the surgical view. The theatre team at the hospital had previous experience working with BERCHTOLD’s Chromophare HID (Gas Discharge) lights. The new build provided an opportunity for the company to introduce its latest development in operating lights, the F Generation Hybrid LED, which combines a one-piece reflector system with LED light engines. This new type of light uses all the benefits of a reflector to create the same homogenous and shadow-free light provided by the previous HID system, but this time combined with the latest generation LED elements. The result is a slim light head with no moving parts internally, while achieving a large focal range, from a small spot to a very wide field with a full 160,000 Lux shadowfree illumination. Each theatre is equipped with triple light heads to cope with the demands of working on multiple operative sites simultaneously with two, three or even four surgeons. This creates a busy surgical environment. For this reason and to provide best ergonomics the lights are not centrally mounted in the room. In consultation with the clinical and design/architects team it was suggested that the mounting of the lights and pendants were best offset from above the operating table to provide the best free moving space of each light head and to create an unhindered operating space where in-light cameras are also used for teaching. Dr Ali Diba, consultant anaesthetist, commented: “To date, there has not been one complaint about the lighting, which means we must have got it right.”
