FEATURE ARTICLES
ANZEX REPORT 2017
PULLMAN MELBOURNE, ALBERT PARK By Warren Crawley, ANZEX Representative 2017
I left Palmerston North for Melbourne as rain was threatening to fall, escaping the week of wet weather to follow. After a quick transfer to the International flight in Auckland I found myself heading toward Melbourne at 36,000 feet landing just before 11 am local time having caught up on some essential viewing of a favourite show during the flight. I spent the remainder of the weekend catching up with friends and preparing for my first day of visits starting with several Monash Heath Facilities. I meet with Sujee Panagoda at the Monash Medical Centre in Clayton to commence my visits for the day. We discussed the various facets of health delivery in the Monash Health region before I was introduced to Brendon Maloney the Facilities Manager for the 660 bed Monash Medical Centre and the adjacent 220 bed Monash Children’s Hospital. Despite being a Monday, which we all know is a bad day for visitors, Brendon freely gave his time to escort me around these two facilities on the campus.
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he Monash Medical Centre was very reminiscent of my home facility, an older hospital struggling to meet the demands of modern patient care. Walking down corridors used for storage in cramped clinical spaces and staff committed to provide the best care possible. I was struck by how well maintained the facilities were despite the age and the number of ongoing improvements being undertaken by Brendon and his colleagues to improve infrastructure resilience and service delivery. There were surprising similarities in the work being undertaken by the Monash engineering team and those as Palmerston North Hospital. Upgrades of electrical infrastructure and generation systems being an example of the similarities we share as well as concerns about flooding and de-risking basement areas, another feature of both facilities. I was particularly interested in seeing the Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratories (Cathlab) where I met Anne Mennen the Director of Development for Monash Heart. She took me on a tour of their suites and explained some of the key features to
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be considered when designing and building a new facility, something in which she has recent experience, as the cardiology services plan to build a separate Cardiac Hospital. In May last year the State Government committed to the construction of the new Victorian Heart Hospital to be built at Monash University Campus. This Hospital will be the centre piece of the Victorian Cardiac Services plan. We moved on to the newly built Children’s Hospital which is being handed over for occupation incrementally since June this year. The expansive plant spaces would be a joy to any engineer with plenty of space to carry out maintenance efficiently and effectively. I was also impressed with the “safety by design” principle being applied throughout the facility. Clinical spaces were light and airy with plenty of circulating space around patients to allow clinical staff to easily provide care no matter what the patient required. As we are investigating retrofitting new positive and negative pressure rooms into a clinical space I took the opportunity to look over the new facilities. It was clear to see the challenges in creating such rooms – particularly the negative pressure rooms.