Delivered by: Zeta Services
Context
King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s largest and busiest teaching hospitals, serving 1.5 million patients annually across a vast estate with over 13,500 staff. Serving the inner-city population of Southwark and Lambeth, as well as millions from tertiary referral centres in southern England, King’s College Hospital deals with 400 Emergency Department attendances per day, and has the largest mental health patient attendance in the UK.
The Trust operates multiple sites featuring a mixture of buildings and water systems that vary significantly in age and complexity.
In a healthcare environment, failure to maintain stringent water hygiene standards carries an exceptionally high risk, potentially resulting in outbreaks of serious illnesses such as Legionnaires' disease or Pseudomonas infections, leading to catastrophic patient harm, regulatory breach, and massive reputational damage. The Trust required a robust, auditable system to ensure continuous, demonstrable compliance with the stringent requirements of HTM 04-01: Safe water in healthcare premises.
Challenge
King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust faced two primary compliance challenges:
Estate complexity and risk: The estate consists of a mix of modern and aging buildings, leading to complex and varying water systems. This required a highly skilled, dedicated on-site team capable of managing day-to-day needs while maintaining a full statutory programme.
Auditability and adherence: The Trust needed to move beyond disparate processes to implement a single, centralised, and validated compliance scheme. The core need was to guarantee schedule adherence, ensuring every statutory task was completed on time, and to provide a transparent, comprehensive audit trail for regulators.
Solution
Zeta Services, part of Complii, was awarded a five-year contract in 2021 to manage all aspects of KCH's water safety program. The solution focused on establishing a technology-driven, proactive compliance framework:
Digital compliance platform: The Trust’s compliance scheme was integrated into a centralised digital platform, ZetaSafe. This system was used for critical asset validation, schematic reconciliation, scheduling, and to create an undeniable audit trail for all activities.
Proactive risk mitigation: Services included the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) technology for continuous remote temperature monitoring and execution of all tasks in strict accordance with HTM 04-01 and HSG274.
Comprehensive service delivery: The scope covered essential risk control measures such as Thermostatic Mixing Valve (TMV) servicing, quarterly showerhead replacement, specialized hot water calorifier inspections, and a robust sampling and testing protocol using both lab-based and in-house methods for rapid detection of Legionella and Pseudomonas.
Results
The implementation of the standardised compliance framework led to immediate and measurable improvements in regulatory performance:
Schedule adherence: Through a process of asset validation and platform reconciliation, Zeta managed to significantly improve schedule adherence, establishing a high level of confidence in the Trust's regulatory due diligence.
Workload completion: In the first full year of the contract, the team completed over 122,000 scheduled compliance tasks across the estate.
Compliance assurance: The project successfully transitioned King’s College Hospital to a proactive, auditable, and demonstrably compliant risk control framework, simplifying regulatory reporting and assuring patient safety by maintaining a centralised, verifiable audit record.