We are delighted to be working with our new member Allergy UK, to interrogate the data collected from their busy help desk. They have 4 trained consultants, working flat out Monday through Friday, dealing with people who have experienced an allergic reaction.
With a vast array of complaints, Allergy UK have an excellent website which helps you address your issue. They are looking for any feedback from their website, as they look to refresh it, so please have a look here.
We met with Dr Marcella Ucci from UCL, the HPA, KTN and Allergy UK in July, to see how we can begin to interrogate this amazing source of information, relating to health effects, products and the internal environment.
Allergy UK tell us they receive on average one call a week to their helpline relating to ill health and new carpets. In some cases, folk have had to vacate their homes. What we are particularly interested in, is all the detail relating to building products. This will help us make the connection to health and wellbeing and product selection i.e. source control.
Simon mentioned this work in passing to a colleague, who remembered she had had a headache for a couple of days, when they laid a new carpet. For every call to the Allergy UK helpdesk, there must be at least a 100 more incidents that go unreported.
So how do we measure these effects? We are pleased that we shall have an article next month from Tim Robinson at Waverton Analytics.
Health and Wellbeing is a continuing theme for ASBP….and it looks like everyone is adopting this theme, with a plethora of events planned for the autumn. Of course, we see naturplus as the best way of specifying healthy, low carbon products; with third party indepndant lab testing and EN 15804 compliant, now with procurement clauses available at the touch of a button. Please see their free to access product databse here. We shall be refreshing the natureplus brochure shortly.
We are developing our expertise on source control and Simon has joined the UCL advisory group for the new MSc Health, Wellbeing and Sustainable Buildings, which will start in September, 2017. We have been asked to provide a CIRIA members briefing on this subject, which we are just putting the finishing touches to now.