The hospital has an 800-bed capacity with 100% single occupancy rooms, and an additional 100 day beds, 40 technical suites, eight emergency (operating) suites, and a variety of specialized units for both treatment and medical research.

RAH offers a broad range of services and specialized wards, each with unique lighting control requirements. Therefore, a flexible system that can be tailored to suit the needs of each department was preferred.

The chosen lighting solution should also promote circadian health and create a healing environment for occupants. Finally, any lighting design should assist in the achievement of a Green Star rating.

With over 100 years of continuous service within the electrical industry, Nilsen has an outstanding reputation for providing its customers with reliable, high-quality lighting control installations.

Nilsen leveraged Philips Dynalite to control over 45,000 DALI light fittings and 8,000 emergency fittings throughout the 9 story, 247,000m2 facility.

The luminaires and control devices feed into Philips Dynalite’s headend software, System Manager, where RAH staff can gain valuable insights about building performance, check occupancy patterns, schedule emergency lighting tests, and more.

Dynamic lighting that grows with your facility

The layout of clinics and wards within RAH change regularly to reflect the evolving needs of the community. As such, Nilsen installed a digitally addressable DALI system that can be reconfigured quickly and affordably as required.

Philips Dynalite enhances the benefits of DALI by mapping each universe onto the much larger DyNet address pool. This links multiple DALI universes together, allowing them to behave as a single, coherent lighting system.

The Dynalite system also supports 96 scenes per area, a vast improvement on DALI’s 16-scene limitation. Its advanced scheduling features enable smooth transitions between scenes in response to the time of day and year, or other network events. Occupants can also make manual ramping adjustments to the colour temperature and luminance independently.

Lighting that puts people first

The emotional and physical needs of patients, their families and healthcare workers were kept at the forefront of this project. Natural light was leveraged to create a pleasant environment for occupants and support circadian health. This was supplemented with tunable white LEDs that can change colour temperature throughout the day to mimic natural daylight.

Each patient room comes equipped with an Antumbra user interface to enable intuitive control over the patient’s environment. The lighting scenes create a homely ambience which reduces the anxiety often associated with a hospital stay.

Lighting in other areas such as the nurse’s station and operating theatres have been tailored to balance the requirements of patients and staff alike. Any preset scene can be quickly overridden by staff, bringing the room to full brightness in the case of an emergency.

Setting the green standard

Paired with Philips LED luminaires, the Dynalite system was able to achieve a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions and help RAH achieve a 4 Star Green Star rating and a Healthcare Design v1 rating. This makes RAH the largest and most technically complex Green Star project in Australia.

This was achieved through a combination of occupancy detection and day light harvesting strategies, and integration with third-party systems such as BMS and HVAC.

A world-class combination of intelligent software, reliable hardware, and sustainable luminaires make RAH a prime example of the ability of lighting control to create smart hospitals.

The automation of lighting scenes creates a touchless environment that can respond intuitively to occupant needs, whilst the flexibility of Dynalite’s digital addressing enables each space to take on a new function at a moment’s notice.

Expertly installed by Nilsen Networks, the care and attention to detail displayed throughout this project have resulted in fantastic project outcomes that will continue to benefit the community for years to come.