Setting up a new decontamination facility

All hospitals must provide adequate facilities for cleaning, disinfection, sterilisation and storage of equipment and instruments to ensure the care and safety of patients, as well as the Trust staff. The current emphasis is on centralising the decontamination of re-usable medical devices, including flexible scopes and to fulfil this purpose a brand new purposebuilt unit has been created at Southmead Hospital, within the Brunel building.

The challenges facing Southmead Hospital Bristol in designing a new Sterile Services facility included the closure of the old SSD during redevelopment of the new hospital, temporarily relocating the sterile service offsite and then designing and opening a new stateof-the-art facility on the Southmead Hospital site. Added into the mix was the need to build a decontamination unit that meets the needs of north Bristol for the next thirty years, equally to be built within a limited budget, timeframe and with limited space. 

Paul Jenkins, assistant general manager for the facilities directorate at North Bristol NHS Trust, was tasked with meeting this challenge and after over six years of planning, the new ‘decontamination facilities’ unit at Southmead Hospital was opened in October this year. To understand the complexity of the task, it is necessary to go back to 2009 when the first stages of planning began. There was an agreed PFI plan to rebuild Southmead Hospital and close the existing Southmead and Frenchay hospitals, amalgamating all services, including two SSDs onto one site. The Brunel building, situated on the original Southmead Hospital site opened in May 2014 and brought together many of the services of Southmead and Frenchay under one roof for the first time.