INTERVIEW
Partners for progress: Delivering healthcare
At Healthcare Estates 2025, HEJ’s editor Niamh Marriott spoke with the team from RFL Property Services, who were highly commended for the 2025 Consultancy of the Year award. Andrew Panniker, Managing director; Laura Wilkes, Programme manager, and Darryn Kerr, NHP Commission lead, discussed their award-winning projects, innovation in healthcare estates, and the challenges and opportunities facing the NHS estate workforce.
Can you tell me a little bit about the journey and the vision behind your highly commended win? What was the vision for the project, how did it evolve, and what were the key challenges along the way?
Andrew Panniker: Okay, so what I’m going to do is tell you a bit about the RFL PS element first, and then we’ll go into the specific projects, which are the CDCs and the NHP – New Hospital Programme. That’s when I’ll bring in my colleagues here as we talk. RFL PS started in 2018. We are a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Free Group. We started with seven people, and now, on the consultancy side, we are up to about 70 people, so we’ve grown rapidly in that time. The good thing about our journey and vision is that we are largely all healthcare professionals who live and breathe healthcare. We get a deep understanding of working within clinical environments, how to get the information we need to make projects successful from all the clinicians who work in the hospitals. Understanding the pathways, the activities, and the patient needs is critical. When we look at a specific project, it’s all about
transforming the clinical experience for the patient and improving outcomes. Embedded healthcare experience is really important in developing that. What we do is develop schemes based on the outcomes, taking the theme of this year’s IHEEM of prevention not cure. Ours is about benefiting the patient and making sure that the estate responds to what the patient needs. It’s about changing pathways, understanding policies,
processes, and protocols, and then applying that into a designed solution. It’s more about patients, improving outcomes, improving pathways, transforming, and really improving the throughput of patients in the hospitals. That’s the ethos that drives everything we do.
In terms of your award for Consultancy of the Year, what is the biggest challenge then? Is it gathering clinician evidence, educating staff, or something else? What do you have to overcome to get to the design phase? AP: Before we talk about specific projects, our biggest challenge really comes down to providing service excellence, making sure that the funding is in place when we need it, and actually securing the required resources. Simon Corben talked about apprenticeships, getting
graduates, and getting more people into the NHS. That is a real problem across estates and facilities. External
consultancy practices are attractive, and being embedded in hospitals is becoming more attractive, but it’s been a long, long journey. Getting skilled people into health and estates as a long-term career has been difficult. It is improving, but we need to accelerate that. Simon has ten graduates starting in NHSE, which is really good. At RFL PS, we’re trying to play our part to accelerate that. Funding is another challenge. NHS budgets are
constrained, and delivering transformational projects within those budgets is increasingly difficult, especially with inflation and construction costs rising over 30% in some areas. Balancing innovation with financial realities is an ongoing issue we have to navigate.
Our biggest challenge really comes down to providing service excellence, making sure that the funding is in place when we need it, and actually securing the required resources.
February 2026 Health Estate Journal 25
HEJ’s editor, Niamh Marriott, on stage at Healthcare Estates 2025 with, left to right, Andrew Panniker, Laura Wilkes and Darryn Kerr.
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