[Images: Sweeping aerial view of the hospital; time lapse footage of construction work]
[Text on screen: Andrew – Equipment Lead, New Footscray Hospital, Western Health]
[Images: Andrew talks to camera in front of the hospital construction site]
Andrew: My role today is to supervise the lifting of the bulk oxygen vessel.
[Images: Timelapse footage of an oxygen tank being installed]
Andrew: Oxygen is a lifesaving drug, and it is a drug. It has to be given under prescription. If you were to walk in having shortness of breath or having a heart attack, oxygen would be applied to you immediately, about four litres per minute.
[Images: Andrew talks to camera in front of the hospital construction site]
Andrew: We use about 8,000 litres of, uh, liquid oxygen in a month.
[Images: Close-up footage of the oxygen tanks being installed]
Andrew: And we reticulate or distribute the oxygen throughout the ward. We've got many hundreds of outlets in this hospital.
[Images: Andrew talks to camera in front of the hospital construction site; aerial footage of the hospital exterior; footage of the oxygen tanks being installed]
Andrew: I would reckon there'd be more than a kilometre of piping within the building. And because it is such a serious gas and so important to have available, we run parallel systems, so there's no single point of failure.
[Images: Footage of the oxygen tanks being installed; Andrew talks to camera in front of the hospital construction site]
Andrew: The siding of this tank, is on a very prominent point in the hospital's design, coming to the main entrance of the hospital. So the design has to be to mute the tanks. We've aligned the tank instead of vertically, as the majority of the tanks you'll see around hospitals, we now have a horizontal tank, which can be nicely put behind its purpose-built enclosure. I reckon the tanks are beautiful, right? But others don't share that beauty. When we were scoping out the dimensions of the tank, we looked around the world. We looked at our similar size hospitals in Australia to determine what we need for now and what we need in the future. The pandemic has also taught us a few lessons about logistics and fill time. This tank and this arrangement of a primary and a secondary vessel, will protect ours for over a month or more if required. Oxygen is one of those life giving commodities.
[Images: Timelapse footage of the oxygen tanks being installed]
Andrew: Without it, we can't operate as a hospital.
[Images: A partnership screen with a white background displays the text ‘In partnership with’ Western Health (logo), Plenary Health (logo)]
[Images: A sliding transition screen then displays the Victorian Health Building Authority and Victoria State Government logos and the url vhba.vic.gov.au]
[End of transcript]
