OFFSITE CONSTRUCTION
Modular approach offers Trusts long-term flexibility
The University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust’s recently completed Treatment Centre at Queen’s Hospital Burton marks a significant step forward in the Trust’s five-year estate strategy. Since the centre’s completion and handover in April 2020, the numerous additional facilities incorporated in the building – including a 28-bed ward facility, specialist operating theatres, imaging suites, and outpatients’ departments, have been occupied, significantly increasing capacity to serve patients, while offering a greatly enhanced built environment for patients, staff, and visitors. Here Ben Foreman, managing director of Catfoss, the offsite construction specialist behind the permanent modular building, recalls the collaborative journey of all involved to get the ‘project off the ground’.
Catfoss says that the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust’s recently completed Treatment Centre at Queen’s Hospital Burton ‘marks a significant step forward in the Trust’s five-year estate strategy’.
The architect, Louis H. Sullivan, is credited with the idea that a building’s exterior design should reflect the different interior functions, evolving the phrase, ‘form follows function’. This is as true today as it was in 1896, when Sullivan wrote, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’. However, given wisdom also suggests that no building should ever have a single purpose!
Funding pressure When I read a recent report from the King’s Fund that discussed how essential capital investment into the NHS estate is if we want to improve the quality of care provided to patients, and to achieve transformational changes to a currently overstretched health service, it resonated with my own experience as a supplier to the NHS. The amount of capital allocated to the NHS has increased in recent years, but, the King’s Fund argues – in my view correctly – that it simply has not kept pace with the service’s needs. Backlog maintenance alone is estimated to be almost equal to the entire capital budget for health and social care services.
70 Health Estate Journal March 2021
In my career, I have seen, time and again, how NHS Trusts often face a conundrum of ‘Funding vs Programme’ in planning and developing their estates. Delays in confirming capital plans and allocation of funding reduce the development options, as projects need to be completed in-year – i.e. before 31 March every year, and delays here artificially reduce their timescale for completion.
Limited to short-term thinking All too often, Trusts are challenged to plan and deliver change where the funding window opens and closes with remarkable speed governed by that 31 March deadline. Those funding cycles and priorities will of course also reflect the vision of the government of the day. Long-term planning, when decisions are often reflective of what can be achieved in a single parliamentary term, though, limits Trusts to short-term thinking for the immediate pressure on their estate, or, at best, the very near future. It is at this point when Catfoss is quite often contacted to provide a ‘quick fix’ solution. Why do I
take calls at this point? Well, operating within this blinkered, rigid landscape results in release of monies for developments being strictly controlled, measured against a time-consuming competitive tender process, and tied to those strict timeframes for project delivery before monies evaporate. I have found that this often promotes autonomous ‘financial estates planning’ for the here and now, when what is needed to fully support and develop the long-term estates strategy is an engaged team much earlier in the process, a team that includes the Estates department and end-user groups to promote ‘planned development based on demand’. This was the predicament that University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust was left with: an immediate need for a winter pressures alleviation ward, an awareness that additional, as yet undefined,
accommodation was required in the same location, and a limited funding window. Understanding that time was against the recognised process of ‘design then tender’, and that assistance was needed
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