CHU de Quebec wins Healthcare Engineering Society Award of Excellence
September 22, 2017
By
CCE
The specialized care centres, among the largest in Canada, was recognized for its energy efficiency initiatives.
The Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society (CHES) handed out its 2017 Wayne McLellan Award of Excellence in Healthcare Facilities Management to CHU de Québec – Université Laval at the Society’s recent 37th annual conference held on September 17-19 in Niagara Falls, Ontario.
The award recognizes facilities that have had outstanding success in the completion of a major capital project, an energy efficiency program, an environmental stewardship program, or in a team building exercise, and CHU de Quebec (the largest specialized care centre in the province and one of the largest in Canada) was recognized for its energy efficiency initiatives.
The prize-winning project concerned three of the five CHU hospitals—CHUL, Hôpital de L’Enfant-Jésus, and Hôpital du Saint-Sacrement—and is ongoing. For the project CHU collaborated with Ecosystem, a Quebec-based firm with offices in Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto and New York specializing in transformations of building energy infrastructure and a partner in energy conservation.
“The CHU teams’ knowledge, combined with Ecosystem’s expertise, led to outstanding results. In 2015, for three of the CHU’s sites, energy consumption fell 30% and its greenhouse gas emissions declined by 56% or 12,914 tonnes,” said Pierre-André Tremblay, CHU’s technical services director, in a media release.
The project included the re-engineering of the heating, air conditioning, ventilation, and lighting systems. CHU made significant improvements including the conversion of steam heating networks to hot water, heat recovery, use of renewable energy (geothermal and solar), and equipment controlled by centralized systems coupled with optimized operating sequences.
CHU has also won the “Integrated Management” award from Association québécoise pour la maîtrise de l’énergie
(AQME) at the 27th Energia gala. The project also garnered The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ (ASHRAE) regional distinction (Eastern Canada). The CHU project is also in the running for the ASHRAE Technology Awards.
The 38th annual conference of the Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society will take place September 16-18, 2018 in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
