Schwarzenberg Hospital, Schwarzach

Space for personal engagement and time for people – values that have sadly become all too rare in healthcare in our hectic day and age.

Project data

Hospital with 14 departments and over 50 outpatient clinics

Opened: 1839

New hospital building opened: 1984

Most recent renovations: November 2020

Number of beds: 517

Employees: 1,477

SCHELL products: VITUS SSC Bluetooth® module, VITUS VW-E-T exposed wash basin tap

This is the vision that the Kardinal Schwarzenberg Hospital in Schwarzach im Pongau, Austria, intends to put into practice. For over 175 years, the second-largest hospital in the province of Salzburg has followed the example set by the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. With more than 180,000 patient contacts every year, the hospital offers interdisciplinary treatment options with a focus on attentive and dignified care.

Alongside the human factor, hygiene is the be-all and end-all for day-to-day hospital operations. With the necessarily large volume of patient contacts – especially in terms of outpatient care – contactless sensor taps are an important strategy for protecting the health of both employees and patients. In the course of a routine maintenance project, the facility managers decided to install multiple electronic VITUS VW-E-T wash basin taps from Schell, including the VITUS SSC Bluetooth® module. The deciding factor here was the option for automatic, scheduled stagnation flushes with corresponding documentation (logging).

Fittings fit for special requirements

The rugged wash basin taps from the VITUS series are most often installed in hospitals, residential homes and other buildings with more demanding hygienic requirements, where standard fittings cannot be used. When it comes to hygienically safe drinking water installations, ensuring the right parametrisation is paramount. However, configuring settings for each electronic fitting individually takes a lot of time to complete. In healthcare facilities in particular, facility managers need to be able to rely on scheduled stagnation flushes: these help to ensure the maintenance of drinking water quality. This ensures nothing is forgotten during hectic day-to-day operations as a result of dealing with medical emergencies. The ideal situation is an automated setup that monitors operations and logs all of the triggered flushes automatically. Cost-effectiveness is another requirement: ensuring that sanitary facilities are operated with an eye on costs should never be forgotten, since hospitals are ultimately also businesses.

Bluetooth® module for logging and monitoring

All of these properties are offered by the Schell Single Control VITUS SSC Bluetooth® module used at Schwarzenberg Hospital, whose infrared electronics can communicate via Bluetooth®. The VITUS SSC Bluetooth® module is installed directly between the fitting and the power supply. With the user-friendly SSC App for the iOS or Android operating system, all of the parameters for the fitting can be configured simply, quickly and precisely. And there’s an especially straightforward approach to configuring multiple fittings of the same model: if all of these are to be given the same parameters, these can be stored temporarily in the app and then simply transferred to the next paired fitting. To ensure drinking water quality is maintained in Schwarzach, the hospital now uses pre-programmed schedules with which stagnation flushes are executed and correspondingly logged. Thanks to the VITUS SSC Bluetooth® module, thermal disinfections are now also significantly easier to handle: the solenoid valve for thermal disinfection can be operated and triggered at a safe distance using a smartphone or tablet.