IHEEM WALES REGIONAL CONFERENCE 2026
Building resilience in the NHS Wales estate
On 6-7 May, IHEEM, with the Welsh Branch and NHS Wales, Shared Services Partnership, Specialist Estates Services, held its annual Wales Regional Conference at ICC Wales. This year, the event explored solutions for building resilient healthcare estates, managing ageing infrastructure to reduce the risk of critical system failures, and improving resilience and response to outages and emergencies – topics discussed in a conference keynote delivered by Jacqueline Totterdell, director general for health and social services and NHS Wales chief executive. HEJ editor Matt Seex reports.
After welcoming delegates to the IHEEM Wales Regional Conference 2026, IHEEM CEO Pete Sellers introduced the event’s theme of Navigating uncertainty – contingency and resilience in healthcare estates. Faced with both the everyday pressures of running of NHS states and facilities and the global pressures that have seen a rise in uncertainty across the board – not least when it comes to the cost of everything from energy to construction materials – resilience in healthcare estates – and indeed healthcare personnel – is becoming ever more key when it comes to an NHS that is continually having to do “more with less” under sustained pressure. Exploring these themes, the first keynote of the two-
day event was A view from the bridge from Jacqueline Totterdell, director general for health and social services and NHS Wales chief executive. Speaking via video, Jacqueline began by recognising the key importance of healthcare engineers and estates managers. “Thank you so much for inviting me to talk with you at your conference today,” she began. “Engineers and estates professionals are critical to the safe, reliable, and resilient operation of NHS Wales and directly underpin patient care and service continuity. You manage our infrastructure risks, statutory compliance, and all of our safety systems, like power, heating, ventilation, medical gases – I could go on – and all of those impact on health service operations and performance.
“NHS Wales faces significant service and financial pressures, compounded by energy [costs] and increasingly unsuitable healthcare estate,” Jacqueline continued. She highlighted the advancing age of many healthcare buildings in Wales, pointing out that some 10 per cent of the NHS Wales estate was built before 1948, with barely a quarter (23 per cent) having been built over the last 20 years. This, she said, posed significant challenges when it came to investigating opportunities and implementing solutions for energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction across the estate.
A shift towards prevention Nonetheless, Jacqueline reflected that the healthcare strategy A healthier Wales: long term plan for health and social care continued to drive a shift towards prevention, integrated care, and delivering more services closer to home. “To date,” she continued, “we’ve had 46 projects
approved by the Integration and Rebalancing Capital Fund, with capital funding requirements of over £182m. Of those 46 projects, 35 relate to integrated care and social care hubs, seven relate to the rebalancing of the adult social care market, and four relate to the elimination of profit from the care of looked-after children. “These schemes provide a platform for systems sustainability by bringing services together in our
NHS Wales chief
executive Jacqueline Totterdell.
24 Health Estate Journal June 2026
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