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5 COMMENT: Contingency and resilience in healthcare estates 6 COVER STORY: A future vision for healthcare facilities 8


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INSTITUTE NEWS TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT HEALTH SECTOR NEWS


FEATURES


24 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.


27 Worthy winners at the IHEEM Wales Awards Following a busy day of networking, keynotes, and meeting with exhibitors, delegates to the IHEEM Wales Regional Conference 2026 made their way to the Celtic Manor Resort Hotel for the 2026 IHEEM Wales Regional Awards presentation.


31 Multidrug-resistant gram-negative bacteria According to the WHO, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a growing threat to global health – one that is placing populations at heightened risk. Paul Owen, global business unit manager – healthcare & life sciences at Mueller Europe, discusses how built environment strategic planning and estates teams can help to manage this growing crisis.


37 Infrastructure: digitising the last mile of care As hospitals continue to digitise clinical processes, the promise of faster, safer care increasingly depends on how well digital tools align with day-to-day operations. Vicky Morley, senior clinical advisor at Systematic, explores how fragmented operational systems create hidden friction in hospitals, and how better alignment between digital platforms and frontline operations can streamline care delivery and improve patient flow.


43 Designing buildings that promote health Architecture should actively promote health, not just treat illness. By integrating outdoor spaces, healthy choices, education, and co-located non-clinical services, we can embed prevention into care settings. However, this requires both bold leadership and capital project reform, as Matt Griffiths, health sector director at Kier, explains.


48 Sustainable parking with digital permits Staff parking is an increasingly difficult area for estates teams to manage, particularly at a time where space is at a premium and simply building new car parks is not a viable option. Here, Ciara Spreadbury, business development & account manager at Mobile Worker Plus – creator of permit and pass management software OCTOPASS – looks at how digital permit systems can help NHS Trusts manage busy hospital sites, reduce unnecessary journeys, and improve the experience for staff.


53 The long-term impact of real-time decision-making In this practice-led piece, written from the perspective of recurring patterns seen across NHS estates programmes, construction consultancy Gleeds’ head of healthcare Andy McNulty and healthcare sector lead (South West) Simon Yeo argue that, rather than simply through strategy documents and national programmes, the future of the NHS estate is actually being shaped by the thousands of decisions made every day by estates leaders responding to the operational realities of healthcare.


59 Neighbourhood health: the delivery challenge The urgency to shift care into community settings to support the NHS –while delivering value for public funds – is clear. Tom Howells, board director and national head of healthcare at Pulse Consult, examines why the shift from treatment to preventative care is integral, what delivery success looks like on the ground, and the estate and operational design components required to enable it.


63 Utilisation technology can transform estates With NHS estates facing mounting maintenance backlogs, limited capital funding, and rising demand for services, making better use of existing space has never been more important. Tony Booty, director at Abintra, explains how, by combining occupancy sensors, environmental monitoring, and strategic estate planning, healthcare organisations can uncover hidden capacity and improve efficiency without costly new developments.


67 Communications and operational resilience Medical emergency communications still rely on single channel systems vulnerable to a single point of failure. James Bushell, head of product at Critico, explains why communication resilience must be considered with the same engineering discipline applied to other critical services.


June 2026 Health Estate Journal 3


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