THE NEW HOSPITAL PROGRAMME
The New Hospital Programme has been described as ‘the biggest new-build hospital programme in a generation’.
strategy is about changing the way we deliver healthcare infrastructure for the NHS, so we can build many more hospitals concurrently. Those of you familiar with the Programme will be wondering how we’re going to build so many in such a short timescale. The answer is that it will be through industrialisation and setting out new standards to take time out of the process, and to be able to manufacture the components and bring them to site and assemble these hospitals.”
Modern methods of construction Achieving this would, she explained, mean using Modern Methods of Construction. While many working in healthcare were familiar with MMC via their experience of modularisation, this was – Natalie Forrest stressed – ‘just one tiny component of what we’re capable of in this sector’. She said: “We need to bring all these things and the associated learnings together to assemble a much better kit of parts that will allow the sector and the industry to come together and develop these components to enable us to build all of these hospitals concurrently.” Equally critical to Hospital 2.0’s success was the work the NHP team is doing with the NHS ‘to transform the way we will deliver (future) healthcare in these facilities’. The speaker said: “Continue doing what we do
Some of the key facets of the NHP team’s approach.
now – even if we do it better – and it will not be enough for us to be able to meet the needs of the people of this country, and the NHS requirements for modern medicine.”
Need ‘to change the way we do things’ Natalie Forrest said that the new hospitals created across England via the New Hospital Programme would be open at the end of this decade, and for them to meet the country’s needs, the sector would need to ‘change the way we do things’. The NHP team is thus working with the Royal Colleges and clinicians, both across England and internationally, to identify the greatest opportunities to change the way healthcare is delivered. At the heart of the NHP team’s
approach is ‘agreeing the right size of hospital’. Natalie Forrest said this required understanding changes in the models of care, and care delivery location – whether closer to home, or via other facilities such as elective care or diagnostic centres, as well as being able to standardise the way demand and capacity modelling are undertaken. She said: “This is a universal process when thinking about a new hospital, but has so far been undertaken in many different ways using different assumptions. So, across the NHS, we want
to be able to standardise this, and, by doing so, achieve it much more quickly, reducing the length of the business case planning process.” Hospital 2.0 would, she said, be the
vehicle for all of these goals – the business case process, the standardisation of the design, the clinical pathways, and ‘how we commission and open the buildings, and ensure they are safe for staff and patients’. Natalie Forrest said one of the NHP team’s guiding principles was that it will use the NHS ‘to tell us what it really needs for the future’. “It’s not for us to tell the service how to function,” she explained, “but rather to facilitate all the building blocks the NHS needs to improve clinical outcomes, and to have the right space, adjacencies, and digital solutions, to maximise staff’s potential at work every day. It’s also,” she added, “about reducing unwarranted variation, because we know this improves quality, and reduces stress on staff, and that patients quite like going and seeing similar environments on a continuous basis.” She stressed that this didn’t mean
that all hospitals would look the same, but rather that from the NHP team’s perspective, the components would be put together in a similar way – an objective requiring engaging all users. This was one of the key reasons she and her colleagues were at the conference – ‘to ensure that we’re visible, talking to the right people, and listening to all the things everyone wants to tell us about how we can do things better’. Hospital 2.0 was also, the NHP SRO said, ‘about utilising the evidence already available to properly learn about what goes well, and doesn’t go well’, in healthcare infrastructure programmes, and continuing the learning, ‘so that we’re learning from ourselves, not just repeating mistakes, and getting better through that improvement cycle’.
The guiding principles behind the Hospital 2.0 initiative, which aims to enable the construction of more new-build hospitals concurrently, ‘at pace’.
58 Health Estate Journal January 2024
The wellbeing of those served She added: “It’s also about the wellbeing of the people we are here to serve, enhancing patient safety, contributing to Net Zero, ensuring that we’re mindful of both the patient and staff experience and
Courtesy of The New Hospital Programme
Courtesy of The New Hospital Programme
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