INTERVIEW
The platform has been specifically designed to be easy to use and navigate.
For example, if you want to run a new service and need
two rooms in Reading for two mornings a week over the next two years, you can find and book that space in minutes. As long as you are registered and vetted, you can book it and use it.
So you’re opening Open Space to other organisations and charities. Can you tell me more about that process and why you’ve chosen to do that? We have both clinical and non-clinical spaces available. Clinical space includes things like treatment and consulting rooms, while non-clinical space might be meeting rooms or offices. Everyone has to register and be vetted, and we check qualifications and ensure the services being provided are appropriate and complementary to the NHS. One of the reasons we built Open Space from scratch was patient safety. We did not want a charity that was approved to book meeting rooms to then be able to book clinical rooms. The system has checks and balances so that organisations can only access the type of space they are approved to use.
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.
48 Health Estate Journal February 2026
Since 2019, we have provided around 730,000
hours of charitable and PCN support, including around 220,000 hours in the last 12 months alone. That equates to roughly £4.8 m of discounted or free bookings.
The recent pilot in South East London and Staffordshire showed some strong results. What’s the feedback you’ve found most surprising and/or encouraging from NHS staff and partners using the platform? The pilot was with a Community Health Partnership. The background to Open Space is that we originally created it to solve our flexible space problem, essentially our bookable space. However, as we built the system, we started to see other parts of the system coming to us and saying, “We quite like to use that for our bookable space as well.” That then led to the question of whether it could also be used as an internal working system for organisations. From there, it expanded further, with people telling
us, “We would love to use it, but actually we have no idea how our space is being used.” They saw that we were using sensors and understanding how the estate was being used, and they asked whether we could help them, whether we could do utilisation studies, whether we could install sensors and provide ongoing utilisation and occupancy data. That is how Open Space evolved into a full space management tool, where we help to understand, manage and then optimise the estate, not just for NHS Property Services, but for the whole of the NHS. The Community Health Partnership is one of
those examples. They had their own booking system, called TAP, which was coming to the end of its life. We have always tried to work closely with Community Health Partnerships in what we do, and this was one of those situations where they came to us and said, “Our booking system is coming to end of life. We like the look of yours. Could we work together, could we collaborate, and is there an opportunity for us to use your system?”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
