June 2014
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BVH Staff Announcements
People Meghan Duggan Joins AKF Boston – AKF Boston angy conservation, waste managenounced that Meghan Duggan, ment, best practices, and behavCEM, LEED AP, has joined the ioral change. firm as director of energy serPrior to that, she served vices. She brings a background of as an account executive at experience in energy and sustainKeySpan Energy (now National ability to her new position. Grid). For the past nine years, she Duggan began her career served as assistant director of at General Electric as a field/ sustainability and energy mancontrols engineer providing Duggan technical services to companies agement for Harvard Business on large, industrial gas turbine power genSchool, developing and implementing a eration projects. comprehensive program focused on ener-
Coulombe Joins Methuen Construction Salem, NH – Methuen Construction announced the hiring of Scott Coulombe as the company’s director of business development. He has more than 20 years of experience in the construction industry, performing value engineering, teaming, estimating, preconstruction services and sourcing creative project financing in the northeast.
Coulombe also has been involved in several international development projects including building luxury housing on new islands that have been created in the ocean. He also was involved in a series of projects that built over 5,300 emergency houses in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
Karl Frey George Iskra served as president from 1998 – 2014. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Council of Engineering Companies of Connecticut (ACEC/CT). He also participates on the State of Connecticut Codes and Standards Committee. His more than 40 years of experience includes system design and project management of educational, research laboratories, healthcare and entertainment facilities.
LeBlanc Joins Vision 3 Providence, RI– Alex LeBlanc has recently been hired as an intern architect by Vision 3 Architects. He currently is working with the corporate office team on offices for Southcoast Hospitals Group.
Scott Coulombe
Wentworth’s Master’s Program
Creating Quiet:
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clude conversation, alarms, paging systems, pneumatic tubes, phones, and cart movement. Most studies indicate that impulsive noise events should be limited as much as possible and that excessive constant background noise levels will cause sleep disturbances. What may be counterintuitive is that the quieter the background noise level, the more intrusive the impulsive noise source. The difference in levels between the background noise and the impulsive noise is key. Subjectively, the higher this difference, the more our ears distinguish the impulsive noise. Since increasing the background noise will reduce the impact of impulsive environments, increasing the background noise level in a controlled manner with sound masking will reduce the impact to occupants during sleep as well. Keep in mind that too high of a background noise level, either broadband or tonal, will still reduce sleep quality. To determine the appropriate average noise levels in a hospital, facilities can consider the following methods for evaluation: • Measure background noise levels in a large sample set of patient rooms. Evaluate the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey question: “How often was the area around your room quiet at night?” The hospital’s rating on this ques-
www.high-profile.com
Bloomfield, CT – BVH Integrated Services announced the promotion of Karl Frey, PE, to president. He joined BVH in 1997 and has over 30 years of engineering design and management experience. His recent design work includes the Jackson Laboratory for Medical Genomics in Farmington, Conn.; Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine; and Central Connecticut State University’s new Social Sciences Hall in New Britain. Under his leadership, BVH received the Boston Society of Architects Honor Award for Design Excellence for the Daniel and Grace Tully & Family Health Center in Stamford. Frey is a member of the UConn Civil and Environmental Engineering Advisory Committee, and a licensed engineer. As president, he succeeds George Iskra, PE, who has assumed the role of BVH Chairman. Iskra joined the firm in 1972 and
tion is based on the average noise level in the patient room as well as the peak noise sources’ amplitudes and frequency. • Once it is determined that sound masking can help the HCAHPS rating, increase background noise levels electronically. A background sound level between 45 and 48 dBA is ideal in a patient room. Implement a patient-controlled sound masking system in a number of single-bed patient rooms for an extended period of time. • Once the sound masking system is added, reassess the HCAHPS quietness scores along with patient outcome metrics for the rooms in which sound masking was deployed. In addition to increasing the background sound level with the addition of sound masking, acoustically absorptive materials should be included in the hospital design to reduce the amount of sound energy “bouncing” around the occupied areas. Television speakers are now kept at the bed of the patients rather than far away on a wall, and hospitals should limit overhead pages, turn pagers to vibrate, and inform staff to be cognizant of their conversational level. Careful design of the nurses’ stations will also help mitigate conversations and noise sources to patient rooms. Benjamin Davenny is a senior consultant in acoustics at Acentech, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
LeBlanc
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A dynamic mix of students, together with instructors who bring both theoretical and applied knowledge to the classroom, creates an ideal learning environment for future FM leaders and builds stronger networks in the field. Below, we highlight three of these talented students. Michelle Moffo Michelle, who currently works as a consultant at Manhattan Software in their Connecticut office, was attracted to the facility management profession because she saw a changing field with a lot of opportunity. She enrolled in the MSFM program at Wentworth because she believed it would allow her résumé to stand out and help her to get ahead. One of the key things that Michelle learned is that FM is a very robust, multifaceted profession. According to Michelle, “Wentworth’s master’s degree crystallized for me the fact that facility management is not just about operations and maintenance—it is a complex field that requires proficiency in a number of areas. The MSFM program at Wentworth prepared me to excel as a facility management professional.” Anthony Rauseo After more than 30 years working in the IT field, Anthony made a career transition into real-estate development and property management. The MSFM program has helped him to launch his own Maine-based business, Big Bear
Rentals (also the subject of his master’s capstone project), and provided him with new skills that aided in constructing the nation’s first Energy Star-rated round-log home. Anthony found the sustainability and operations courses in the MSFM program to be particularly valuable, since they’ve helped him to become more self-sufficient—and save money—in his new venture. He is very satisfied with the MSFM program’s outcomes and looks forward to growing his business. Randi Eggleston There were several aspects of the MSFM program at Wentworth that were appealing to Randi, who works as a space planner at Boston Scientific, including the flexibility that the program provides. The fact that she didn’t have to come to campus every week for every class in the program made it easier to balance her educational aspirations with her obligations as a busy working professional. The classroom environment itself was also attractive to Randi, and spurred her professional development over the past two years. “All of the professors work in industry, so they are able to relate the instructional content to the real world,” Randi said. “My classmates work in jobs related to facility management, creating peer-to-peer learning as well as regular opportunities to talk shop.”