Editorial

Citation

Finch, E. (2012), "Editorial", Facilities, Vol. 30 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.2012.06930aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Facilities, Volume 30, Issue 1/2

The common theme in this double issue of Facilities is health. It begins with a look at the UK situation regarding cleaning in hospitals. Most prominent of concerns in the UK context is the hospital bug Clostridium difficile. The paper by May examines the evidence base surrounding infection control. More specifically, it considers the contribution of environmental cleaning in infection control. Based on a literature review of health industry reports and academic findings, the author attempts to glean evidence regarding the effectiveness of cleaning practices. He argues that more needs to be done to disseminate the findings of clinical studies to the facilities management (FM) community. From the opposing perspective, more needs to be done to allow the FM community to have a “voice” in current infection control journals.

Remaining on the theme of health, the paper by Poulston examines the evidence surrounding Feng Shui. The paper looks at the adoption of Feng Shui as a form of landscape-based divination in the context of hotel accommodation. It goes on to look at whether there is any scientific evidence to suggest that Feng Shui is a substantive discipline of relevance to facilities design. The findings suggest that Feng Shui is largely limited to high quality, internationally branded hotels. This may suggest an association with Feng Shui that delivers improved health building characteristics. However, the paper does not attempt to make any unequivocal observations about the longstanding scientific basis of Feng Shui. The author goes on to describe a planned follow up study of 20 hotels using evaluations scored on a weighted three-point scale over 50 item related to Feng Shui characteristics.

Occupancy rates are major considerations both in hotel and hospital facilities. For hospitals, bed use is the key criteria used to measure effective use of a facility. The paper by Boussabaine considers the French context, examining data for 19 short stay and long term care hospitals in Paris. The findings suggest that the operation and maintenance costs (O&M) are significantly influenced by the type of medical activities undertaken in the medical facility. The author argues that the results outlined in the paper will help in developing operational budgets for health care facilities.

The paper by Yik highlights the pivotal role played by hospital engineering services (HES). In this paper, the author considered the procurement route being considered by the responsible body in Hong Kong for public health facilities, the Hospital Authority (HA). A crucial part of the study was to ascertain the quality of HES delivery under the current procurement arrangements taking account of intangibles and indirect effects. The author suggests that the key factors underlying the performance of the HES operation is linked to the probability of failure of components and the complexity of remediation. As such, the authors argue that the decision to outsource is unlikely to have negative impacts and the decision can be largely based on a basis of potential cost savings of each procurement option.

The winner of the Best Paper award for the CIB W070 Symposium 2010 in Sao Paulo, is presented in a revised and updated form in this issue. In the paper, Rothe considers whether the age of a building user has an impact on their preferences for the work environment. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) the researcher sought to cluster respondents by age category. This led to the identification of five observable clusters based on regression analysis. The conclusions from the study point to one remaining “unknown”: that is, whether the observed differences are to do with “generation” characteristics or whether they are due to acquired traits resulting from age and experience. As always with good research, it leads the way to new unanswered questions.

Edward Finch