HEALTHCARE ESTATES 2022 KEYNOTES
Key challenges for the sector’s future workforce
Speaking in the opening ‘Workforce’-themed keynote at last October’s Healthcare Estates 2022 conference, Sir David Behan, Chair of Health Education England, and Nick Hulme, Chief Executive at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, gave their standpoints on some of the key workforce challenges facing both the healthcare engineering and estate management sector, and the wider NHS. They also looked ahead at some of the elements they believed would need to change. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Preceding the two speakers, IHEEM’s President, Paul Fenton MBE, gave a President’s Address reflecting on his past two years in the role. Appropriately – given that the two speakers who followed him discussed workforce-related issues – he gave a particular ‘thank you’ to the healthcare estates management and healthcare engineering profession as a whole – recognising all that the professionals working in the field had achieved in the past three years. He said: “It has been your tenacity, drive, determination, and unyielding hard work – in assisting our clinical colleagues in delivering those clinical services – which have saved so many people’s lives.” Paul Fenton said that during the pandemic, the ‘importance and value’ of the EFM profession had been ‘demonstrated like never before – to our patients, to our Trust boards, to our staff, and to the population we serve’. He added: “When I look back at the hard work, effort, and support, our profession has given during that time,
I look proudly on the Institute which I’ve had the greatest honour to lead as President over the past two years.”
Chair of Health Education England After concluding his address, Paul Fenton declared the conference officially open, and introduced the first of two subsequent speakers – Sir David Behan, the Chair of Health Education England. He explained: “Sir David began his career as a qualified social worker, and has previously held the role of Director of Social Services in three local authorities. In 2003, he became the first Chief Inspector of the Commission for Social Care Inspection, and subsequently worked for the Department of Health as a Director General for Social Care, Local Government, and Care Partnerships. He was also a member of the NHS Management Board, and, between 2012 and 2018, Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission. Now Chair of Health Education England, he is a member of the full Executive Board of NHS England.”
He continued: “Our second speaker, Nick
Hulme, is Chief Executive of East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, which was formed in 2018 with the merger of Ipswich Hospitals and Colchester Hospitals. Following the merger, he has fulfilled a number of roles, and in 2021 was seconded to lead the NHS England National COVID-19 vaccine effort for 12-15-year-olds. More recently, he was asked to join Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust part time, to help them through some difficult times. I’d like to welcome Sir David and Nick to the stage.”
Paul Fenton looked back on a busy and productive time as IHEEM’s President, and thanked healthcare EFM professionals for their hard work and commitment supporting clinical colleagues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Arguably the ‘number one priority in healthcare’ Sir David Behan began by saying how pleased he was to see that ‘Workforce’ was one of the key priorities in this year’s conference programme. He said: “It’s arguably the number one priority in health and care, not just in the UK, but globally.” In his presentation he said he would focus on three main points. He elaborated: “The first is the need to develop a more strategic, long-term approach to workforce planning. Secondly, we must regard workforce as our human capital, and invest in it over the long term, much in the way we have with the wider health service, and, thirdly, we will require more, but different, staff, as we move into the future.” On becoming Health Education England Chair in 2018, Sir David said one of the things that first struck him about workforce planning was that it tended to focus on operational planning, ‘often at the cost of any long-term or strategic planning’. Secondly, service and financial planning had seemingly developed separately. He elaborated: “We thus often have a Service Plan, and the money to deliver it, without the necessary staff, because workforce planning has been separated. Thirdly,” he continued, “the debate about workforce planning focuses more on the supply, than on the demand side. I think we need both, and a clearer and louder voice on the demand side.”
January 2023 Health Estate Journal 21
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