PROJECT PLANNING AND SUPPORT
Develop a good dialogue with the healthcare workers and community to reap the benefits of the project; hearing from them will create more support around the project, and lead to better outcomes. Essentially, building a project that the public will approve of and find value in is an essential element of public and patient interaction. You also need to evaluate the impact of the proposals on the local community, and the impact of any change through your equality impact assessment. Your Project director may only oversee a business case
NHS Property Services’ role on the Catterick Garrison project was to deliver an approvable business case which demonstrated the long-term healthcare benefits identified by the ICB.
the infrastructure, but true success will be through service integration and enabling the right clinical capacity. The MOD has been a fantastic partner in the process, adapting to the challenges of sharing a building with the NHS, and what that would mean in terms of a long-term partnership between the two. Both the NHS and the MOD had to ensure they could
Karina Dare
Karina Dare, Primary Care Estates Strategy lead at NHS Property Services, has 30 years’ experience in the health and disability sector in the UK and New Zealand, working in primary and secondary care, clinical service management, change management, estates and facilities management, and strategic asset management. She has 20 years’ experience in estates management and development, including strategy for office, general practice, and community hospital schemes. At NHSPS her
work has focussed on optimisation of the NHS estate. She has a national role within the organisation’s Estates Strategy team, with a particular focus on Primary Care. Karina has a BA(Hons)
in History, a PGC in Innovation & Improving Performance, and a CMI Certificate in Strategic Management & Leadership.
The project was also a first in England in terms of integrated partnership working between the NHS and the MOD.
46 Health Estate Journal August 2025
afford to complete the project, and in such financially challenging times, it was very important for both organisations to work together in a very structured way to ensure that we didn’t go ‘off piste’ and cause unnecessary costs to the project. As this was the first project of its kind, we also had to factor in all the research opportunities and national research bodies that would be involved in helping to prove we would deliver these health outcomes over an extended period of time. This meant the strategy was quite complicated, and had to take account of all the varying needs of each organisation to ensure that health outcomes and economic outcomes were equally met.
Engage leaders and stakeholders Engaging with leadership and stakeholders, and getting their genuine commitment, is vital to completing any business case and gaining the necessary funding approvals. To try to bring your business case to life, make sure that you use good visuals such as artwork to clearly show to everyone involved what the project will look like, and how it will be constructed. This was used to great effect with the Catterick Garrison project. Equally, ensure that you get all the stakeholders to visit
the site and see the issues and problems you might face to make sure they are fully on board from the very beginning.
like this two or three times in their career. It is a highly specialist area, and it is important that you get the most out of the time you get with them. They may not have the time to consider the minute detail; the Project team developing the business case needs to ensure it gives fair warning of what is going well, and when we need the team’s political support to unlock issues. In this role you need to be flexible, and have a high level of resilience, as you will undoubtedly run up against issues, and it is important that you have the leadership in place to resolve them.
Get to know your Project team There are a lot of steps to take before you put pen to paper and write your business case. You really need to identify who from the wider project team will be involved in the business case development, and understand their level of knowledge and experience. In the case of Catterick Garrison, it was important that I also got to know and understood the MOD’s different ways of working and how we could best work together. We had not done anything similar before, or indeed
worked together before, so it was even more important for us to get to know each other. It might be that you have lots of experience, but others on the team may need a bit of hand-holding, and it will also take time to decipher the jargon that different organisations use. You need to be able to deliver the project jointly, and work well with your Project team; being flexible, resilient, and open with your ways of working, is more likely to lead to success. With Catterick Garrison we had to work out from the start: is the project affordable, and how will it be funded? We had to think creatively, and work out how we could deliver cost savings. In this case, we took advantage of the benefits of partnering with the MOD, looked at the space required, and jointly saved 10-15% on space by sharing a significant proportion of the staff and support spaces. Some examples of this are having just one reception for the building, combining waiting areas, and having a single staff room.
In addition, make sure that you double-check that you have covered all potential costs – elements such as where
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