Lunchtime Learning Legionella Control

Hello and welcome to today’s lunchtime learning webinar from Robinson’s Facility Services. This is the third in our series and today’s topic is all about Legionella control. I’m your host, Kevin Ayres.

Now, Legionella control is like one of those topics that’s really easily missed. It kind of tends to affect, let’s be honest, dull, out-of-the-way equipment that just kind of usually just works. It’s not an issue until it is, and then it can be really, really serious.

I’m really pleased we’ve got an expert on hand who can shed some light on some of those dark corners of your operations and help keep everyone safe. So let’s welcome – let’s do a bit of techy stuff here – let’s welcome Ben to the webinar.

Good afternoon, Gabby. Good to see you.

Yeah, good. What’s it like? You’re in Yorkshire, I assume?

I’m not today. I’m down in Devon today. So what’s it like up there?

It’s wet and dull as normally. I’m very tempted to make a joke there, but I’m not going to be fair. It is pretty. It’s not wet, but it is pretty dull. It’s kind of a standard winter overcast day here.

Um, Ben, we’ve got loads of people online watching already. I think I see we’ve got about twenty-nine people on. So it’s great. Thanks. Thanks for giving up your lunchtime. I hope you’re eating something nice wherever you are.

So Ben and I again, I’m going to talk to Ben for about thirty minutes and then we’re going to have time for some questions. And if you’re too shy, we’ve got some kind of quick-fire questions that I can rattle off with Ben at the end.

So, Ben, where are we? We’ve got a little bit of time for people to join. So, Ben, why don’t we just dive into this? Firstly, kind of like, well, what is Legionella control? Why is it a concern for commercial properties?

Well, in terms of control, it’s a very good question. And quite often I find that there is a lot of bad guidance, a lot of bad advice out there where people just aren’t doing enough. And control is basically a number of measures from anything from complete risk assessment to clean disinfection services to temperature monitoring maintenance or the view of trying to control the bacteria from multiplying and growing in your water systems.

Great. So, well, I guess that begs the question to somebody that doesn’t know an awful lot about this. And I’m guessing online we’ve got people who are real experts with this and already dealing with this through to people like, I’ve kind of heard of this thing and I know I probably ought to be doing something about it, but I’m not really sure what. So why don’t we kind of just take a step back and go, well, what is Legionella? Let’s start with that.

Legionella is a bacteria that is mainly found in natural water. So reservoirs, lakes, but well, since it kind of came to our attention in then, it’s a fairly new bacteria in those terms. The problem we have is when it gets into our commercial, any sort of building water systems, and that’s where we have a problem. It’s generally okay in its own environments, but once it gets into a man-made water system, given the right environments, we can have problems with it and hence why the statutory obligations to manage it as a building manager, or if you are in charge of maintenance and running of a building, there are obviously control measures that you need to implement.

Sure. Well, that sounds pretty obvious, I guess. And just before we rush on, just so it’s a bacteria. So what effect can that have on, you know, what does it, how does it affect people or animals or, you know, the things we’d be concerned about?

The bacteria is aerobic. So you contract the Legionnaires’ disease by breathing in the water droplets. So you can’t catch it by contaminated, you know, by drinking contaminated glass or shaking someone’s hand or anything. So it’s all about managing. And this is why the control is really important that you put the right controls in place. Because all systems are different. You have higher risk systems in some buildings, lower risk. So it shouldn’t be some sort of blanket bomb approach where, you know, they’re all done the same. You could have all sorts of different systems. You could have spa pools, you could have a lot of showers, you might have mini showers, you might have storage systems. So they’re all very, very different in that regard. So your controls are generally led by what you have on site. And that’s where starting with a risk assessment is always the best course of action.

Sorry. Sorry. There’s no one size fits all in other words, because it, you know, it kind of really depends on your system. So just, just quickly to hone in on that though. Like, so what, if I got Legionella, you know, if I got this bug in, what would it do to me? Like, how ill would I be? How long would I be? You know, is it, is it going to kill me? Is it just going to make me ill or what?

Legionella is a form of pneumonia. Um, so, you know, the media have, obviously from a media perspective, it’s, you know, the media love it. It’s, um, there’s a lot of scaremongering out there, and that’s where you need to put all these things into perspective. Your job really as a building manager is to make sure you have the right control measures in place. Even if there isn’t an issue, you might have an audit, but you need to make sure those measures are in place so that if there is an issue, it can be managed like that. But in terms of you as an individual, contractor and engineers, not all of them are fatal. I think the stats at the moment, I think it’s got a fatality rate of about ten to twenty percent in the UK. So hopefully in the short term it can be treated.

Right. But that’s still pretty bad, right? It’s not going to make me a bit poorly. There’s a chance they think could kill me. Right. And so I guess there must be legal obligations then to control this. What are some of those?

Well, it’s not, again, these are guidance documents. It’s not illegal not to have Legionella control in place. It’s not illegal not to have a risk assessment, but there is guidance set out by the Health and Safety Executive, HSG, and the approved code of practice L8, primarily the key documents that you need to abide by. And if you don’t abide by them, make sure you have your own control measures in place. That are suitable and would be deemed satisfactory to the HSE. And I look at it very much like the Road Traffic Act. If you caught speeding, you prosecute under the Road Traffic Act. In the same way, if you are prosecuted for not having the right control measures in place, you prosecute under the Health and Safety Work Act. So it’s not a directly legal obligation just to get that kind of right. These are guidance documents to help you as a building manager maintain control.

Sure. But I guess as, you know, if that was me to take your speeding example, right, I could say, well, I don’t have to do this, but ultimately I could still kill myself and other people. So it’s still something I want to, you know, I want to abide by and take measures to, you know, I passed my advanced driving test last year as a result of, you know, beating I’ve kind of you know educated myself about how to be a better driver right so it’s a similar I guess a similar kind of thing we want to be hopefully people who are here watching want to be responsible building owners we don’t want to have to kind of go to the HSE oh so you know sorry I didn’t do that and and to our customers clients um and staff right so um so okay so what are Like, how does Legionella, you know, surely there’s a closed system, but how does Legionella even get into our buildings? You know, why should it be a concern? You know, like, how does it get in?

Well, like I said, it’s a fairly, you know, we learn obviously every year as development goes on, but over the last forty, you know, forty-five years since it’s been around, so to speak, even though it’s been around for thousands of years, but since we’ve known about it, we now know, you know, it travels in natural water systems, so it can travel on your mains water.

So there is an argument to say that even in our homes, you know, you can’t stop the bacteria on low levels entering a normal domestic system. Your job as a building manager is to make sure the control measures don’t allow the multiplication of that. And that might be due to, that might be temperature control, carry out certain remedial works, disinfection works. But your job really is, there is no kind of, stop where you can stop the bacteria from entering. It will naturally, you know, it can live in mains water on very low levels. Mains water is generally chlorinated up to about 0.1-0.5 ppm. So even at that low level, you know, even in chlorinated water that we can all consume, it can be found.

So the problem we have is once it gets into a man-made water system, we give it a ‘hotel environment’ where it might be nice and warm. There might be rusty water tanks, uh, redundant pipework, primarily temperature on domestic systems are the big problem. And that’s where, with the environments like that, you will have multiplication. And what the key thing here is, is, you know, I’ve been in the industry for twenty years now, but the key thing is, it’s not the driver, it’s not the car, it’s the driver. So you really need to be assessing who is the operator in the building.

You know, a gym full of twenty-five-year-olds compared to an end-of-life care home are two completely different risks. They might have simple water systems, but your risks are much higher in a care environment. And this is where you shouldn’t just have a blanket bomb approach in terms of control measures. Really assess who is using the building. What are their susceptibility risks? And those kind of things. So we know it will travel on the water network. We can’t really stop it getting into the water system. Your job is to now control, make sure your temperatures are right, your remedial works where there are risks identified and managed and you’re fulfilling your statutory obligations in terms of um having a robust control measure, doing a Legionella sample once a year and thinking ‘oh it’s fine it’s clean’ – you might have a negative system now doesn’t mean you would have in an hour or twenty-four hours, you know, so this is an ongoing uh control, which, you know, a couple of webinars ago, we had a pest control expert in, and it sounds very similar. Like, you know, you could today, you haven’t got a rat in vegetation, but it’s not that you say it couldn’t happen tomorrow.”

So if you, if you leave it too long, you know, guess what? You didn’t realise that the next day after you did the testing or you went looking, you don’t have a problem. So, yeah, I guess it’s that thing. And I guess with things like bacteria, it is the kind of concept of bacterial load. Right. And you can’t stop bacteria. But if it’s very low levels, then your body typically copes with that. It’s when it’s kind of overwhelmed because there’s there’s the concentration of bacteria high. And again, that’s why the more the idea of control rather than stopping this thing. I guess that’s not a very helpful way, but control is a better way of thinking about it.

I try and keep things fairly simple. I’m not a microbiologist, but I’ve been in the industry a long time and I look at it in the same way with your food in the fridge. You put your food in the fridge so bacteria doesn’t grow. So in the same way with legionella control, you’re trying to avoid lukewarm temperatures. If you left your food on the side and then ate the next day, you probably end up with a bad stomach. So you put it in the fridge to keep the temperature low. So vaccines will go in the same way. That’s what, in effect, you’re trying to do with the water system, keep your hot water hot. Slow down that multiplication. Yeah, and the cold, cold. And that’s in simple terms.

Sorry, you mentioned before, and I don’t think you actually meant to do this, but you said about we’re kind of providing a hotel environment. Now, you shared some sort of slides with me before, and you mentioned, let me just bring one of those up. Because I kind of like this story. Where are we? Oh, we’ve gone to the wrong slide. Let’s go back a little bit. You mentioned you sent me this one. So tell us about this. So this was kind of like a real-life example of a real hotel. So it really was a hotel for Legionnaires.

Well, the Bellevue Stratford in Philadelphia was where it came about. So it was an annual event where legions gathered together, ex-military personnel in the US.

It was, I think, there were two thousand people attending the event, and ultimately, after this one event in 1976, 221 people became ill, and 34 of them died. Wow! So this is where it all started, and hence the name. If people ever think ‘Where’s the name come from?’, it was ultimately named after the Legion. Yeah, I did wonder. Yeah, I was going to help you. So I hadn’t made that uh… yeah, cool. So it’s on the side that didn’t make that connection again. They didn’t know whether it was, um, you know, food poisoning.

There was, you know, there was a lot of pressure at the time on scientists to find out what it was. It took about a year to find out it was a bacteria that lived in water and it effectively taken over the building water system, and that was the result. So that, you know, that was the first time, you know, as humans would ever come across it. But looking, you know, looking at history now and the research and development that goes on with it, it’s obviously been around, you know, as long as mankind’s been around. You know, it lives in its present as its soil and their own environments. But so in that regard, it’s still fairly new. So what you will find going forward is there are changes to the guidance documents. They do generally get a bit more robust every year.

You might find that they’ve brought in expansion vessel flushing not so long ago. You’ll find that there will be changes constantly. So you do need to keep up to date with the guidance or your service providers with any changes to make sure that your controls are still satisfactory.

Sure. And I guess, I guess we’ve come across it because we’ve, we’re now controlling water. There might be times where water sort of stills and can get stagnant because it’s like you say, in an expansion vessel or something, it’s not kind of moved on. It’s not being flushed out regularly. And maybe it’s warm for some reason, either at warm summer or, or because of, you know, heating in a hotel or whatever. And you, you know, it’s a great breeding ground, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the, it’s not a legal requirement, but there is kind of a, you mentioned some, you mentioned the Health and Safety Executive. So tell us a little bit about the sort of, I think you mentioned HSG 274 and things like that. Can you talk through some of the kind of, legislation, sort of pseudo legislation, again, you know, my, my, these are guidance documents to ultimately help you as you know, building managers, building operators.

And this is where you generally use a service provider to summarise, I suppose it’d be like using a lawyer for a certain thing, you get an expert to kind of summarise these documents, but you do, you know, your control measures need to be in line with HSG 274 and the Approved Code of Practice L8. Um, so yeah, they’re not – these are guidance documents written by the HSE. So you know, in the case of an incident, God forbid, or an audit, um, you need to make sure that those control measures are in line with that document. But what’s really important, I find over the years, is the most important process for you all to start with is a risk assessment and making sure that’s procured properly. You know, over the years, it’s a commoditised industry, as we all know, with all these things.

And, you know, it’s important that, you know, the survey is done properly and substantially. Otherwise, if there’s things missed, if there’s risks missed, systems missed, you know, remedial works will be missed. Control measures won’t be robust enough. So for myself personally, giving some general advice out, it’s really important that the risk assessment is… done completely thoroughly, and it’s not a shelf document. It should be a live document. You’re up to date with if there are any changes, you know, you need to be updating that risk assessment if it needs to be, or if it’s as simple as maybe a basin replacement, you might take a note of that. But it shouldn’t be a document where we’ve done them in February, we can now put it on the shelf and forget about it for a couple of weeks. It shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise. I have a thing in – I have a tiny insight into this back in the day.

So I used to work for Esso, Fawley Refinery, as a young engineer. And I remember that, you know, they’d have to, you know, we’d have to go out and do site visits. And they used to really emphasise that because, you know, you can, as a young engineer, you can kind of look at a diagram of what things should look like and evolve, you know, there’s like a little two-triangle, you get out there, and it’s like this big and it’s just rusted completely solid and it feeds a tank that has got a hole in it. You know, it is covered in rust and it, you know, and and so that that actually – you sent me some pictures here. Let’s uh just have a look at those just to kind of emphasise the point here. Um, so you know this is kind of what the diagram says. You know, when you look at the documents you get out there and it’s kind of actually, you know, it could be a rusty old tank with holes in it or, you know, some hideous stuff going on.

You know, so that survey, um, you know, talk us through some of some of these. Um, yeah, I mean, if you refer to the guidance, it’s not mandatory where you need to disinfect a water system. The the guidance says inspect annually. Now, a remedial work such as a disinfection would be raised following that inspection. So whether it’s yourself doing it or a service provider, they would generally inspect the tank if there was a need for disinfection. They should evidence it with a picture because, again, it’s guidance. It’s open for debate. You might think it’s okay. The service provider won’t. But like anything, as soon as you store water, it’s open to bacteria.

And this is where you generally use a service provider to summarise. I suppose it’d be like using a lawyer for a certain thing; you get an expert to kind of summarise these documents. But you do, you know, your control measures need to be in line with HSG 274 and the Approved Code of Practice L8.

Um, so yeah, they’re not – these are guidance documents written by the HSE. So you know, in the case of an incident, God forbid, or an audit, um, you need to make sure that those control measures are in line with that document. But what’s really important, I find over the years, is the most important process for you all to start with is a risk assessment and making sure that’s procured properly. You know, over the years, it’s a commoditised industry, as we all know, with all these things. And, you know, it’s important that, you know, the survey is done properly and substantially. Otherwise, if there’s things missed, if there’s risks missed, systems missed, you know, remedial works will be missed. Control measures won’t be robust enough.

So for myself personally, giving some general advice out, it’s really important that the risk assessment is… done completely thoroughly, and it’s not a shelf document. It should be a live document. You’re up to date with if there are any changes, you know, you need to be updating that risk assessment if it needs to be, or if it’s as simple as maybe a basin replacement, you might take a note of that. But it shouldn’t be a document where we’ve done them in February, we can now put it on the shelf and forget about it for a couple of weeks. It shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise.

I have a thing in – I have a tiny insight into this back in the day. So I used to work for Esso, Fawley Refinery, as a young engineer. And I remember that, you know, they’d have to, you know, we’d have to go out and do site visits. And they used to really emphasise that because, you know, you can, as a young engineer, you can kind of look at a diagram of what things should look like and evolve, you know, there’s like a little two-triangle, you get out there, and it’s like this big and it’s just rusted completely solid and it feeds a tank that has got a hole in it. You know, it is covered in rust and it, you know, and and so that that actually – you sent me some pictures here. Let’s uh just have a look at those just to kind of emphasise the point here.

Um, so you know this is kind of what the diagram says. You know, when you look at the documents you get out there and it’s kind of actually, you know, it could be a rusty old tank with holes in it or, you know, some hideous stuff going on. You know, so that survey, um, you know, talk us through some of some of these.

Um, yeah, I mean, if you refer to the guidance, it’s not mandatory where you need to disinfect a water system. The the guidance says inspect annually. Now, a remedial work such as a disinfection would be raised following that inspection. So whether it’s yourself doing it or a service provider, they would generally inspect the tank if there was a need for disinfection. They should evidence it with a picture because, again, it’s guidance. It’s open for debate. You might think it’s okay. The service provider won’t. But like anything, as soon as you store water, it’s open to bacteria.

So these systems need to be maintained. And the example on the left is a tank that’s on a roof area. So the issue you’ll have there is heat gain, weather, potentially damage from birds and all sorts of other different sort of animals, maybe trying to get into a drink or just generally deterioration by being weathered. And then the examples in the middle are tanks that have maybe had no lids for years. So you need a tight-fitting lid. The example in the middle where you’ve got effectively the skin over the top, that’s known as a biofilm. That’s always a good sign the tank’s not turning over. So if you ever see that, nine times out of ten, that will be, it’s probably whatever it was feeding, it’s now no longer feeding. You might have got some basins or a bathroom it was feeding, it’s no longer being fed. So you develop this effectively skin over the top, which is a biofilm, and bacteria can live and breed and multiply rapidly in biofilm. So um, it’s a bit of a no-no from a hygiene point of view. So these are just examples. You know, you need to keep water systems moving, keep them clean, and especially if you’re consuming the water, I mean it’s – it’s one of these is bad enough if you’re thinking about showering or washing, but if you the thought of drinking out of one of them is, yeah, it’s another story.

Well, I refer back again to the pest control webinar we had. You know, we live in the countryside in a farmhouse. So it’s kind of the outside is constantly trying to get in and generally does quite a good job. And it’s kind of my worst nightmare that some bird or rat is sort of rotting away in my upstairs water tank or something. So I’m quite pleased. They do come and check quite regularly. And we’re also off-grid for water. So, you know, they came and checked it all the other day and replaced the UV tank thing the other day. So yeah, that kind of, I guess that, I think if I was a facilities manager, I just want to know that I’m kind of on top of this stuff so I can sleep at night, right? To make sure that, you know, people aren’t going to get ill on my watch kind of thing.

So if I’m in that role and I’m guessing there’ll be people, you know, one of the many people who are watching, some of the many people watching are in that kind of role. You referred to some of them, but like what are some of the specific steps that property managers can take to mitigate this risk? You know, like what can they do proactively? Like I’ve said before, your first course of action should always be a risk assessment. I have people who contact me and say, ‘I’ve been told I need a Legionella test,’ and it’s just wrong advice. It wouldn’t stand any sort of defence should an issue go on. You can’t manage a risk that you don’t know what it is. The only way you’re going to understand those risks is by having a risk assessment done.

So it’s again, it shouldn’t be, ‘Let’s try and get the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest assessment.’ And then we’re happy to pay whatever it says really well. Your priority always is the risk assessment and, and ultimately temperature control. So my, my priority would always be, let’s have a look at the, let’s have a look what we’ve got first, where the risk, so complete a risk assessment. And when you have risk assessments done, it’s so important. I’ve done many years of surveying. You must support the surveyor, whoever they are, whether it’s a service surveyor you deal with now or whether you deal with Robinsons. It doesn’t need to be the most technical person in the world, but someone who understands the site, who has access to all the keys in all the rooms. There’s nothing worse when you get on site and someone says, ‘Here’s a bunch of keys. Can you crack on?’ Things will be missed. And if things are missed… remedial work to be missed, risk, you know, so supporting them and giving them as much information you can, from old records from an old risk assessment, and some sort of diagrams always helpful as-built drawings are even better – voices rare, you know, in reality, you get these available.

So yeah, I would always start with a risk assessment and then follow the risk assessment. That’s the reason why you’ve had it done. You know, if it’s recommending a control scheme, a specific one for certain risks. You might have showers. Follow, you know, use that as a scope of works effectively for implementing your next control. Like I’ve said, you can’t manage a system. You can’t control a system that you don’t know anything about. So start with risk assessment and implement and use that as your scope of works to go forward.

And might that involve actually treating the water at all or, you know, either occasionally or as a kind of an ongoing thing?

Yes. And what about monitoring? Like, is it just a case of that people come on site and test this or can you put in sort of ongoing? Is there any sort of ongoing monitoring you can put in?

Again, the risk assessment should lead you on the control. But as a general rule, it’s split. It’s generally in three sections, so you have, you normally your assessment to start with, you have a control scheme, but there may be remedial work. So you might have water tanks as a great example here. The the non-compliant – there’s all sorts of things wrong with them from not being cleaned. They’re not, you know, there’s no lids, there’s probably no rodent filters. They’re not like – there’s numerous remedial works they will be brought up on the risk assessment. So again, you would complete remedial works either depending on your technical team in-house or with support of your contractors. But trying to get your building as compliant as you can by working through your risk assessment is important.

Okay, now that’s really, really helpful.

So what are the… um, let’s just get rid of that sec, uh, what are the – let’s say we’ve had a problem or we, we, we picked the cheap option, right? The the kind of the tick-box option. We didn’t really take it seriously. We got like a test or even worse, we didn’t do anything. Like, what are the what are the consequences of that? Uh, if there was a Legionella outbreak, obviously there’s health consequences, but what kind of like what’s the what ton of bricks is about to drop on me from who? Right?

Well, you don’t, you don’t need to have an issue anymore to be audited. You know, the HSE are quite welcome, you know, and if there is an issue nearby or, you know, they’re quite – they are – they are the power to audit your system. So you again, right? You said about risk where you might have lower systems, higher systems depending what sort of site you have, but your job really as a building manager is to make sure your statutory obligations are met. You might think, ‘Well, we’ve done the risk assessment, there’s no further action to take, it’s made, it’s fed, we don’t need showers, risks are generally low.’ You always want to be in a position, if you’re audited, it’s like anything in life, it’s fine until it goes wrong and then it contracts out. In the same way, you don’t want to be in an uncomfortable position where you’ve got an aggressive prosecution lawyer could bring you loads and loads of questions. ‘Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you use this service provider? Why don’t you use this?’ So I always encourage you to try and do at least the minimum of what the guidance says. And then you’ve done your best. It doesn’t mean you’ve completely eradicated the risks, but you control schemes that meet the guidance documents. You’re doing your best to control it. You’re doing what you can to manage the risk. And like I said, you can’t ever get away from the bacteria living in the water system. You know, it will naturally find its way into the system. It’s your job really to – Yeah. Like all risks, you can’t totally eradicate risk. You can live with the fact that there’s an inherent risk there, but you’re managing it and you’re being seen to manage it.

So do you have any examples of where people didn’t manage this risk well and the HSE did come down on them like a ton of bricks or they got prosecuted or something like that? Do you have any examples?

The biggest outbreak in the UK, as it stands, is still the Barrow Furness outbreak. I think there were seven deaths and two hundred affected there. And ultimately, it was a badly managed cooling tower when it went to trial eventually. There was loads of holes found with Barrow Council and the service provider at the time, Interserve, where it was just badly managed from the council all the way through. And as you can imagine, the prosecution went through it thread to needle.

And this is what I say when I do my training sessions. Even if you’re responsible for just flushing water, you are part of that control. You might not be the responsible person or the deputy person. You might think, ‘Well, I’m only flushing the tap.’ You are part of the control machine, and you will form part of that investigation should anything go wrong. So it’s important that you have refresher training and people, even who are doing the mundane tasks, understand the importance of what they’re doing. So these things do happen, and it’s not all the time. But we do have outbreaks a lot. If you go on the HSE website, you can see there’s a live update with them all on. If they’ve not come to a trial, they won’t disclose their names, obviously. But there’s cases going on all the time. There might be high resistance, but you find them in nursing homes who were prosecuted in two thousand eighteen. You know, there’s all sorts of different sites from process water systems to nursing homes to even JTF were prosecuted pre-COVID over a case with a hot tub. So it’s from all walks of life that these kind of these issues occur.

Sure. And again, I know I keep referring back to it, but it’s a very similar issue with the rodents or the pest control, rather. Even if it’s a relatively low risk, something like in a school where you’ve got loads of relatively healthy kids, it still doesn’t play well in the media. Even if people just got ill and that was it, it still doesn’t look good, right? So I guess even from a, we don’t want people to get ill, but neither do we want to be seeing people getting ill. It’s just really bad all round for one’s reputation, I guess. I mean, literally, yeah, from a commercial perspective, you know, putting aside the important area, you know, organisations like Bupa and, you know, that do not want to be associated with, because the media do love Legionnaires, you know, as soon as there’s an issue, it’s all over the media, we all know. So, yeah, from a commercial perspective, it’s not very good either. Not not not something we want to be associated with.

So uh, Luke’s asked – um, I think you addressed this, but um, I’ll just ask it anyway just to be on the safe side. It’d be great to have some examples of typical remedial works you mentioned um, I think a little bit about that, but do you want to expand on that at all? Follow you like what happens following a risk assessment? What would people have done? You know, what might, what are the range of things they might have done? Well, the key, the key thing, this is not a ‘do it and and it’s gone.’ You need a legionella control. You need a legionella budget going forward. We know we want to be here, but to get to there, there’s some initial stuff. We’ve had an initial discussion. ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s really bad.’ To even get on that kind of level playing field, what am I going to have to do? What might I have to do? Well, there might be quite a number of remedial works from water tank replacements to redundant pipework having to be removed. Boilers that are not performing. You often find, especially with plumbing, where plumbers add on, there might be a building and they’ll just build an extension and they’ll just tap into the pipework. Before you know it, the performance of that boiler might not be sufficient for the size of the building.

And this is what I say when I do my training sessions. Even if you’re responsible for just flushing water, you are part of that control. You might not be the responsible person or the deputy person. You might think, ‘Well, I’m only flushing the tap.’ You are part of the control machine, and you will form part of that investigation should anything go wrong. So it’s important that you have refresher training and people, even who are doing the mundane tasks, understand the importance of what they’re doing. So these things do happen, and it’s not all the time. But we do have outbreaks a lot. If you go on the HSE website, you can see there’s a live update with them all on. If they’ve not come to a trial, they won’t disclose their names, obviously. But there’s cases going on all the time. There might be high resistance, but you find them in nursing homes who were prosecuted in two thousand eighteen. You know, there’s all sorts of different sites from process water systems to nursing homes to even JTF were prosecuted pre-COVID over a case with a hot tub. So it’s from all walks of life that these kind of these issues occur.

Sure. And again, I know I keep referring back to it, but it’s a very similar issue with the rodents or the pest control, rather. Even if it’s a relatively low risk, something like in a school where you’ve got loads of relatively healthy kids, it still doesn’t play well in the media. Even if people just got ill and that was it, it still doesn’t look good, right? So I guess even from a, we don’t want people to get ill, but neither do we want to be seeing people getting ill. It’s just really bad all round for one’s reputation, I guess. I mean, literally, yeah, from a commercial perspective, you know, putting aside the important area, you know, organisations like Bupa and, you know, that do not want to be associated with, because the media do love Legionnaires, you know, as soon as there’s an issue, it’s all over the media, we all know. So, yeah, from a commercial perspective, it’s not very good either. Not not not something we want to be associated with.

So uh, Luke’s asked – um, I think you addressed this, but um, I’ll just ask it anyway just to be on the safe side. It’d be great to have some examples of typical remedial works you mentioned um, I think a little bit about that, but do you want to expand on that at all? Follow you like what happens following a risk assessment? What would people have done? You know, what might, what are the range of things they might have done? Well, the key, the key thing, this is not a ‘do it and and it’s gone.’ You need a legionella control. You need a legionella budget going forward. We know we want to be here, but to get to there, there’s some initial stuff. We’ve had an initial discussion. ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s really bad.’ To even get on that kind of level playing field, what am I going to have to do? What might I have to do? Well, there might be quite a number of remedial works from water tank replacements to redundant pipework having to be removed. Boilers that are not performing. You often find, especially with plumbing, where plumbers add on, there might be a building and they’ll just build an extension and they’ll just tap into the pipework. Before you know it, the performance of that boiler might not be sufficient for the size of the building.”

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So there might be, you might be struggling to maintain control. And that is a word that I want you to all remember, control. It’s all about, is your water system in control? If you are running water around a building and it’s lukewarm, but you’re trying to achieve temperatures of over fifty degrees, that building is out of control. Bacteria can grow. So, you know, again, this is where your monthly monitoring is really important, the testing, you know, the non-conformances are raised. Because even if you’ve got a low temperature hot water, you know, like I said, bacteria can grow. It might be an issue with the pumps, the boiler, it needs to be investigated and looked at. As minor as it might be, it might trigger, there’s quite a big issue that we have, and it might be something that needs to be planned for from a budget perspective, capital spend, but the ongoing testing is really important to raise that. Well, that’s a perfect time to jump in. We’ve got a question here. And just before I ask Claire Willie’s question, like I said, I’ve got a whole load of kind of quick-fire questions I’m going to fire at you. But this is a point, feel free to ask any questions. You’ve got Ben here for another sort of ten minutes or so. So do use it. Oh, my goodness. We’ve got loads here. That’s great. Okay. So let me get going with this. Oh, we’ve had this before. he’s frozen again we’ve got bugs in our system I’m gonna ben’s gonna drop he’s gonna rejoin and it should work again so I will ask uh I’m just gonna kick you out ben and then you join again okay Sorry, in our testing, we’re not quite sure why it’s going on. It’s obviously a bug in the system. We’ve both got internet. It’s not a problem. It’s just, I think when it’s got some sort of movement sensor, whenever it sort of moves, it seems, I don’t know if it’s a loose wire or something, but there we go. Right. Why is it always in this picture? Why is it always at the worst angle in the phrase? I know. I’ll just say we’ve got bugs in our system. We need to monitor it more carefully, clearly. So Chloe’s asked, in a health setting, you know, specifically a GP surgery in her case, following a full report, how often should the water temperatures be checked? And is this the only check that we should be looking at? Again, I mean, if it’s a healthcare environment, you should refer to the healthcare document, which is… htm zero four zero one there is specific guidance because again it’s about susceptibility to the people so you you’re you know is it a gp surgery was it a medical center yeah yeah let me put the question on screen so um yeah sorry no that’s the wrong one that’s the wrong one sorry let me uh let me show that one hang on sorry uh sorry claire um there’s the question Yeah, you should be checking, again, follow the guidance, but you should have a monthly temperature regime. I mean, I would guess, I don’t know the water system, but it’s probably quite a simple water system, might be a combination boiler, a little water cylinder, so it should be fairly simple for you to manage. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do that in-house with support of a service provider to oversee it, you know, if it’s quite, you know, if there’s only a few outlets, but Again, follow the risk assessment. If there is any issues in terms of proliferation, showers, showers are obviously a source. Again, follow the risk assessment and that should guide you through it. But a simple monthly temperature regime should be sufficient on a GP surgery. I hope that answers your question. Okay, great. I’m going to just show Harriet’s here. That’s why I put it up. It’s a little bit similar. She’s asking specifically, like, what equipment would they need to do that? You know, how would they do that temperature check? Is that easy for them to do? It sounds like it is. Temperature checking is a fairly, you know, it says what it says on the tin.

Here’s the transcription of the provided text, with corrections for spelling, grammar, and formatting in British English:

Transcription

“So there might be, you might be struggling to maintain control. And that is a word that I want you to all remember, control. It’s all about, is your water system in control? If you are running water around a building and it’s lukewarm, but you’re trying to achieve temperatures of over 50 degrees, that building is out of control. Bacteria can grow. So, you know, again, this is where your monthly monitoring is really important, the testing, you know, the non-conformances are raised. Because even if you’ve got a low temperature hot water, you know, like I said, bacteria can grow. It might be an issue with the pumps, the boiler, it needs to be investigated and looked at. As minor as it might be, it might trigger, there’s quite a big issue that we have, and it might be something that needs to be planned for from a budget perspective, capital spend, but the ongoing testing is really important to raise that.

Well, that’s a perfect time to jump in. We’ve got a question here. And just before I ask Claire Willie’s question, like I said, I’ve got a whole load of kind of quick-fire questions I’m going to fire at you. But this is a point, feel free to ask any questions. You’ve got Ben here for another sort of ten minutes or so. So do use it. Oh, my goodness. We’ve got loads here. That’s great. Okay. So let me get going with this. Oh, we’ve had this before. He’s frozen again. We’ve got bugs in our system. I’m gonna Ben’s gonna drop. He’s gonna rejoin and it should work again. So I will ask uh, I’m just gonna kick you out Ben and then you join again. Okay. Sorry, in our testing, we’re not quite sure why it’s going on. It’s obviously a bug in the system. We’ve both got internet. It’s not a problem. It’s just, I think when it’s got some sort of movement sensor, whenever it sort of moves, it seems, I don’t know if it’s a loose wire or something, but there we go. Right. Why is it always in this picture? Why is it always at the worst angle in the phrase? I know. I’ll just say we’ve got bugs in our system. We need to monitor it more carefully, clearly.

So Chloe’s asked, in a health setting, you know, specifically a GP surgery in her case, following a full report, how often should the water temperatures be checked? And is this the only check that we should be looking at?

Again, I mean, if it’s a healthcare environment, you should refer to the healthcare document, which is… HTM 04-01. There is specific guidance because again, it’s about susceptibility to the people. So you, you’re, you know, is it a GP surgery? Was it a medical centre? Yeah, yeah, let me put the question on screen so um, yeah, sorry, no, that’s the wrong one. That’s the wrong one. Sorry, let me uh, let me show that one. Hang on, sorry, uh, sorry, Claire, um, there’s the question.

Yeah, you should be checking, again, follow the guidance, but you should have a monthly temperature regime. I mean, I would guess, I don’t know the water system, but it’s probably quite a simple water system, might be a combination boiler, a little water cylinder, so it should be fairly simple for you to manage. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do that in-house with support of a service provider to oversee it, you know, if it’s quite, you know, if there’s only a few outlets, but again, follow the risk assessment. If there is any issues in terms of proliferation, showers, showers are obviously a source. Again, follow the risk assessment and that should guide you through it. But a simple monthly temperature regime should be sufficient on a GP surgery. I hope that answers your question.

Okay, great. I’m going to just show Harriet’s here. That’s why I put it up. It’s a little bit similar. She’s asking specifically, like, what equipment would they need to do that? You know, how would they do that temperature check? Is that easy for them to do? It sounds like it is. Temperature checking is a fairly, you know, it says what it says on the tin.

It’s a fairly simple task to do. What’s important, Harriet, is what you do with that information. What you’re going to do is fill a logbook in, put it on the shelf, and if you need to understand the temperature profile, so if the temperatures are wrong, you need to resolve that or, you know, have an audit trail of, ‘Right, we found an issue with contact as a plumber, we found an issue, we Dave, the technical maintenance man, has dealt with this.’ So I’m going to – I’m going to nail you here. So I just want to make sure that we ask to answer questions. So what, what equipment do they actually need to get those temperatures? You need to calibrate. You need a, a thermometer, a calibrated thermometer. So you can get these online. There’ll be specific providers that sell. They’re not always very good because they’re quite reflective. So again, there’s loads on the market. There’ll be options on Amazon and stuff. But I would try and specifically find a provider. And they’re not very expensive. But try and find an organisation that sells specific equipment for legionella control because you’ll have then the support of maybe a calibration service or, you know, supporting documents that the the the equipment is relevant. You don’t have in a position where you said, ‘Well, I’ve been checking the temperatures with a chicken probe that I brought from home.’ You need to be, you know, so try again, whatever you use, if you do your own, just do a bit of due diligence. Whatever you, they’re not a big spend anyway, so try and get a bit more of a premium one if you can. Um, and when I say premium, it might be. Calibration again, like, you know, like anything, it’s only as good as, as how well it’s tested and, and, and that sort of thing. Well, you don’t want to be in a position again where people question the source and say, ‘Well, when did you last calibrate it? It’s been in the cupboard for four years.’ Well, you’re not, it’s again, not calibrated. I didn’t know I had to do that. Yeah. Yeah. So it might be, I know it’s not very green, but it might be cheaper that you just replace the gauge every year rather than get it posted off to be calibrated. Yeah. Those sorts. I mean, we, know service providers use quite, you know, robust things because they’re on it all day. You don’t need anything of that sort of level. Um, I think I’ve – I think I’ve frozen again. Oh, okay. Right, well, to save time, I’m gonna – we can still hear you. So um, I’m gonna I – I know you – it’s a comedy look. So we’re gonna keep that uh – I’m going to jump to Stephen here.

Thanks for the seminar. You’re very welcome. And I picked this one because I’ve been a landlord myself, so I feel your pain. So in a multi-let office with one water supply which then feeds separate tenants, I’m assuming that’s premises, not demises, but do you believe the landlord should be responsible for temperature testing all outlets within the building or just those in the common parts? It’s a real, well, excuse the pun, but it’s a real common problem. And it ultimately comes back to what was agreed. And when you have a building with multiple tenants, you have to define who’s doing what. And there might be an element of crossover because you’re using the same water system. Who’s inspecting the tank? But I would always go back, go back to the agreement ultimately and see what’s in there. It might be that you have a full repairs agreement and lease maintenance package where you need to maintain the water system. It might be the landlord’s responsibility. But if it’s all a bit grey, I think you need to go back and decide who’s doing what. With a view, if it is ever inspected, you know, your ducks are in line and you know where you are in life. But it happens especially, you know, you look at the city centres with all these flats and some are commercial, some are residential. We’re doing that, you know, it is a common, a much more common problem. And I would rather you do have a bit of crossover than you do not enough. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just just make sure you know what does the paperwork say? What are you responsible for ultimately?

Um, Carl’s asked here – um, he, he’s uh, he’s nailing you here. So he’s saying – um, mentioned temperature checks uh, but not given guidance on the kind of the specifics. So like what are the critical temperatures uh that people need to watch out for? You know, above or below or, you know, you’ve mentioned in general and again is that more – it’s horses for courses or are there specific –

The key temperatures, I mean, it’s in the guidance, but the key temperatures, you need to keep your cold water under 20 degrees. So under 20 degrees, Legionella can live, but it’s dormant. So if you can imagine its own environment in lakes and reservoirs, it doesn’t really cause a problem because it’s generally under the temperature. The benefit we have with our climate here, we don’t live in Southeast Asia or Australia or, you know, where the temperatures are high and you’ve got problems straight away. But our mains water and water out in the, you know, it’s generally under 20 degrees. So we’re generally all right. The key is to avoid 20 to 45 degrees. So you need to be managing water systems. Boilers should be stored at 60 degrees and they should be reaching your outlets of minimum 50 degrees. So it gives you a little bit. I’m just going to jump in there because where are we? I think Harriet or Claire asked a follow-up question. So maybe that answers that, that we currently check monthly near the boiler and that’s where it’s going to cool down the most. Is that kind of the way she should do that?

Yeah, it depends on the size of the system again. I mean, you might, this is where you’ve got to be careful with what you’ve got. If you’ve got a small system, the size of a house, it’s a lot different to an infirmary hospital or a big college site. So yeah. So let’s assume it’s kind of a mid-sized surgery. How about that? You do your nearest and furthest as per the risk assessment.

And you normally do a percentage of the outlets between that. So all the other outlets get checked once a year. The reality of it is if you’ve only got five outlets in the building for the sake of it, I would probably do all of them. But if you’re doing the likes of the Leeds General Infirmary, you know, doing all the temperatures in one go would probably take you a month. So you would manage that a bit differently where you would follow the guidance where you do all your nearest and furthest sort of percentage of what the classes, the, the, the, the other outlets in the, uh, in the hospitals. But if it’s a small site and there’s a handful of outlets and you want, you know, I would probably for the sake of it to keep it clean and keep it nice. I’ll probably just do all the checks once a month.

Right. OK, that’s really helpful. I’m just going to take one last question from Carolyn. I know we’re danger running over here and I just want to get you back to your day jobs. So from Carolyn, ‘Do we need a risk assessment if our water is recycled for a CNC machine?’ Can you just clarify the CNC machine and what kind of site you are? Yeah, I don’t think Carolyn’s going to do that quick enough. So if that’s not… I’ll just give you…

Risk assessment should be a live document. So it’s quite common people revisit a risk assessment every two years. But this has got to be led by you. It is your risk. It’s not the service providers. It isn’t the contract. This is your risk, and it’s ultimately your responsibility. So if you feel the risk assessment is still live and it’s sufficient and nothing’s changed, there is an argument why reinvent the wheel and spend the money if you’ve kept it live. If, for instance, you’ve done a risk assessment and it was a college building, but now it’s an end-of-life care home. Well, I would say the risk assessment needs to be revisited because it doesn’t reflect the time. So, but it’s got to be led by you, you know, it’s your risk and you know, you’ve got to be get, try not to get dragged into, um, you know, people saying, ‘We’ll take the risk away from you.’ We’ll like, no, you know, the, the, the book stops with you. It’s who you appoint to help you and how you do it. So, I would always follow the risk assessment. If you’re not happy with the risk assessment or things have changed, I will revisit the risk assessment and bring that further forward.

Brilliant. Well, look, thank you, Ben. Sorry I kept you frozen like that, but thank you. You’ve been super, super helpful. I hope you’ve all found today’s session thought-provoking. So, Ben, I’ll let you go. I’ll put you out of your misery and take you off screen for a sec there. Yeah, so… But you’ll be able to watch it again. And especially some of the details we went past, so you want to rewind and watch again. You can also see the, just want to show you the previous, let’s bring up the link. You can see the previous sessions, the URLs shown below here. We’re building up a whole kind of library of useful videos. There’s a whole load of topics, videos there, and all the previous webinars will be available at this very URL. So go and check those out. And this one will be available kind of in a few days for you to watch the replay. So firstly, yeah, thanks for watching. Look out for any future webinars we do in the new year. If you have any further questions, or lifts or pests or any of the other, you know, many other services we provide, please do get in touch. Just put those details on screen. Yeah, and thanks for watching.