FUTURE HOSPITALS
New Hospital Programme: ‘We’re not just builders’
The New Hospital Programme has been tasked with transforming and modernising NHS healthcare facilities in England. It is, the team behind it says, ‘a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our approach to the NHS – much more than a set of new buildings, it’s a whole new way of working’. Transformation director and Chief Nurse, Josie Rudman, outlines ‘the programme’s ambition, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead’.
Artists’ impressions of what Hillingdon’s new hospital building, one of the New Hospital Programme’s Cohort Three schemes, could look like.
Our mission is to replace outdated infrastructure with facilities for both patients and staff that are on the cutting edge of modern technology, innovation, and sustainability. We will radically improve the way hospitals are designed, procured, and built, but this is more than a construction process; it is about the whole way the NHS operates, and a real chance to develop and deliver much-needed extra capacity. Within the New Hospital Programme, it is the Transformation Team’s job to ensure that this happens. We are the middle person, working with hospital Trusts to help them achieve what they need from new buildings, and helping the construction sector and suppliers to deliver on that need. We will be there all the way – from the design phase and demand and capacity modelling, through creating flexible clinical and staff spaces, and beyond opening to post-occupation learning.
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Supplier partners to ‘come on the journey’ We need supplier partners who want to come with us on that journey – not just once, but several times to deliver 40 schemes by 2030. At the end of each build, we will analyse what went right, what should be repeated, and what can be improved upon and refined for future builds. This is important to us because we’re scientists – we are an evidence- based profession. Our decisions must be based on measured reasoning, not personal likes and dislikes. Our approach to how we build hospitals is the same as our approach to our jobs – show us the evidence for doing something that will bring measurable benefits and we’re interested. We will come together with NHS Trusts,
construction companies, and suppliers, to co-design and co-produce our hospitals. We’re excited by the prospect
We will radically improve the way hospitals are designed, procured, and built, but this is more than a construction process; it is about the whole way the NHS operates, and a real chance to develop and deliver much-needed extra capacity
28 Health Estate Journal March 2023
of developing hospital buildings that will stand the test of time, developing new standards and sourcing the right products. We’re giving NHS staff the tools and
operating procedures to get the most from their new environment – to drive safety, positive experience, and productivity.
A ‘lack of logic’ Few hospitals have been built to function as modern hospitals. Original structures have been added to with all sorts of extensions and temporary structures that somehow become permanent. The result is that they don’t function as well as they should. The lack of logic behind which departments have ended up where makes effective working harder, and it is our job to design hospitals that make sense, with clinical adjacencies that help the workforce and improve productivity and patient experience. One of our key priorities is introducing single bedrooms for all new hospital designs, for example. We talked to stakeholders, we gathered the evidence, and we learned from it, and now we are making it a reality. Through modular processes, standardisation, and a repeatable design, we can build single rooms that are flexible enough to suit any patient group. All will have en- suites with modular washrooms, there
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