Isolated Power for a Hospital Operating Theatre Suite
Bringing a multi-theatre surgical suite in the Eastern Province in line with NFPA 99
The challenge
A private hospital in the Eastern Province was expanding its surgical capacity and needed the new operating theatres to satisfy NFPA 99 requirements for wet procedure locations. Their design consultant had classified the theatres as Category 1 spaces, which meant isolated power was required rather than optional.
The complication was not the new build. It was that several existing theatres in the adjoining wing had been commissioned years earlier, and their line isolation monitors had never been recalibrated. Any accreditation review would have looked at the suite as a whole.
What we did
We began with a survey of the existing suite rather than quoting only the new theatres, so the hospital could see the whole compliance picture before committing to a scope.
For the new theatres we supplied and installed isolated power panels with integrated line isolation monitors, each feeding a dedicated reference-grounding point and the theatre’s critical branch outlets. Panels were selected for compatibility with the Bender and PG LifeLink equipment already used elsewhere in the facility, so the biomedical team would not be maintaining two different families of hardware.
For the existing theatres we recalibrated the monitors, corrected documentation that no longer matched the installed distribution, and handed over a testing schedule.
Installation and commissioning were sequenced around the theatre schedule, working in the gaps between surgical lists rather than requiring the suite to close.
Outcome
The new theatres were commissioned with isolated power systems and line isolation monitoring in place, and the existing theatres were brought back to a documented, tested state.
The hospital now holds a single maintenance schedule covering every theatre in the suite. In our experience the majority of NFPA 99 gaps are not design failures but maintenance drift, so the schedule matters as much as the hardware.
Services involved
Facing something similar? Tell us the constraints you are working within and we will tell you what is actually feasible before you commit to a scope.
Talk to our teamClient name and identifying project details are withheld under confidentiality. This is a representative account of work we carry out; scope descriptions are accurate, and we have deliberately not published performance figures we cannot evidence publicly.