INTERVIEW
Space to care: Digital management
Chris King, head of Open Space at NHS Property Services, explains how the digital platform is helping the NHS understand, manage and optimise its estate, and why flexible, bookable space is becoming central to the future of healthcare delivery. HEJ spoke exclusively with him about how Open Space is supporting the government’s 10 Year Health Plan, sustainability ambitions, and creating more room for patient care.
HEJ: You started out in commercial real estate – what drew you into the NHS estate, and how different has the experience been compared to the private sector? What keeps you motivated? Chris King: My first career was in recruitment, and I was doing recruitment for a property recruitment company, and I just absolutely loved what these people were doing. So, I finally realised what I wanted to do. So, I went back and retrained and my career since has been in property. I started at CBRE, and I moved to Knight Frank, and my background has been commercial real estate investment and development mainly. I ended up coming to NHS Property Services because I wanted to give back. I know that’s probably a standard thing for a lot of people working in the health sector. We love the NHS. I think everyone does. It’s a really important institution. We all want to maintain it, we all want to protect it. We all want it to keep going. I came here really as a as an opportunity to give back to the NHS. And it’s lovely. It’s lovely to finish the work day and
though it’s challenging and may be really busy, you know you’re making a difference.
That’s such a nice answer. I’m guessing that’s what keeps you there, even when you do have long days, difficult conversations, long deadlines. You know you’re doing it because you’re getting that sense that you’re giving something back and it feels good. Yeah, 100%.
Can you tell me a bit about NHS Open Space – how would you describe it in simple terms – what problem does it solve?
NHS Open Space is a space management solution. It does two things: if you are a healthcare estate leader, it gives you the tools to be able to either understand, to manage, or to optimise their space. Then, for services, for people who are delivering services to patients, Open Space can provide them with a booking platform, which is open for them to be able to see all of the spaces in one place. Think of it as a sort of like a Right Move meets Booking.
com style where all the space is available, and it just makes it very easy for them to be able to find the space that they need, book it, and then they know that they can turn up and use it. So, the focus on the services is not to worry about the space. They can find it within a couple of minutes. They can book it and then they can purely focus on patient delivery.
So in terms of the biggest challenge, would that be educating people about how to book the space, or to actually get them to use the technology? I know sometimes uptake can be quite tricky. Yes, we call it change management, but it’s exactly that. In the NHS, the focus isn’t always on the estate, because rightly so the focus is on treating people, and caring for patients. So, when you’re trying to implement a new process which will benefit them, but it’s a change to what has been used historically, time needs to be spent on communicating with staff and helping to educate on these systems. We need to explain why we’re doing this and why it’s a benefit for them, and for the NHS. The fantastic thing is that once we’ve done that, and one
it’s been implemented, what we find is the system we’ve built does mimic usual processes that would be typical in everyday life. It’s the same sort of process as booking a cinema ticket
or a hotel room. The system works in a very similar fashion. So once people in healthcare have used the system and understand it, we see an incredibly high adoption rate.
So, it’s similar to booking a cinema ticket, for example. Is it intuitive or can it be integrated with other services, such as Google calendar? Can you use it on your phone or a computer? How did you design the user interface to be as friendly as possible? We can do all of the those things. You could open your phone now and search for NHS Open Space and it will come up. It can be used on a tablet, laptop or desktop. It’s there and available. It’s very easy to use, very intuitive.
February 2026 Health Estate Journal 47
Chris King.
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