The evidence existed. Finding it took four people two weeks.
A friend of mine used to run estates for a large hospital. He told me this over a coffee, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.
A patient died during surgery. That is the fact at the centre of this story and I am not going to dress it up. What followed was an investigation, as there should be, and early on the surgeon put forward a cause: the air handling unit serving the theatre. Ventilation in an operating theatre is not background comfort. It controls pressure, filtration and air changes, and if it is not right, the theatre is not safe. So the question landed on the estates team. Prove the AHU was serviced, maintained, filters changed on time, and compliant.
They could prove it. The work had been done. That was never in doubt.
It took my friend and three colleagues two weeks to show it.
Where the evidence was
Nowhere, and everywhere. Service reports in a filing cabinet. Filter change records in a contractor's PDF attached to an email in someone's inbox. Validation certificates on a shared drive, in a folder named by whoever set it up years before. Commissioning data in a box. Some of it dated before the current team arrived. Four experienced people, full time, for a fortnight, assembling a story that should have been sitting ready.
While they did that, four senior estates roles were not running the hospital. And a bereaved family, a surgeon, and a hospital were waiting on an answer that the paperwork already contained.
Every estates professional reading this knows the feeling. Not "did we do it" but "can I find it, fast enough, in a form someone else will accept".
The worktop
I showed him Samtap. It was sitting at the end of my kitchen worktop, an air handling unit tagged in the demo estate. I tapped it, opened the asset, and downloaded the Golden Thread Report. Every statutory duty on that unit, who discharged it, when, the certificate behind each one, the gaps if there were any. It took seconds.
He looked at it for a while and said: "Wow. That would have saved us so much time. If I still worked for that hospital, I would be demanding this, regardless of the cost."
I am quoting him because I could not have written a better line, and because "regardless of the cost" is what an experienced estates director says when he has done the maths on two weeks of four people's time against one report.
What good looks like
The evidence should live on the asset, in one place, in the order the investigator will ask for it, from the day the unit is installed to the day it is removed.
- Every duty on the AHU, filtration, pressure, air change verification, inspection and service, attached to that unit, under the healthcare standard that applies where the hospital stands.
- The engineer proves each visit at the point of work with a tap of the tag, and the report or certificate is captured then, not filed later.
- The record belongs to the building, so a change of contractor, or of estates director, does not take the history with it.
- One report, on demand, that an investigator, an insurer, a coroner or a procurator fiscal can read without a guide.
That is what Samtap does. Not to replace the four people. To give them their two weeks back, and to give everyone else the answer on the day they ask.
The standards in one box (if you want the detail)
Theatre ventilation: Health Technical Memorandum 03-01 (England and Wales) and Scottish Health Technical Memorandum 03-01, covering design, validation and annual verification of specialised ventilation in healthcare premises.
Underlying duties: Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974; Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 (ventilation); COSHH 2002 for local exhaust and filtration where applicable; PUWER 1998 for the plant itself.
General information, not legal advice. Details of the incident have been changed and the hospital is not identified.
Run estates for somewhere that would have to answer that question? Request a Golden Thread sample report for one asset at samtap.uk. It takes seconds. Ask us how we know.