IHEEM DIGITAL WEEK KEYNOTE
stands at about £400 m over the forthcoming three years. We have also established a Data Governance Board, to look at the different forms of data that NHSE/NHSI receives nationally, and that the NHS EFM community provides us with locally, to ensure that we can do things slicker and faster, with less interference to our day-today operations, in the future. “ On ‘Workforce issues’, NHSE/NHSI would very shortly release the new Workforce Strategy, with training and diversity ‘at its core’. Before Christmas, Simon Corben said his team also planned to launch an Estates survey, ‘to understand and ensure that we are representing you as effectively as we can’. He encouraged all to complete it. Eight new estates and facilities-related standards were meanwhile due for publication in the next few weeks, with 10 more ‘in train’, while NHSE/NHSI had funding in place for the next two years for further such guidance.
Capital funding
Turning to capital, Simon Corben asked: “What have we learned through COVID? Pace, standards, teamwork, and transparency, have all provided us with phenomenal agility, and I am truly grateful to all the teams involved in the Nightingales, and all the other truly important works that have gone on behind the scenes to give us greater resilience within our infrastructure. It’s important that we drive this through other capital schemes, and we are seeing this in the £1.5 bn provided to us in late June to spend on four specific initiatives – eliminating mental health dormitories, A&E, critical infrastructure, and the Hospital Improvement Programme 2 (HIP 2) acceleration.”
Simon Corben said the latter was working well, allocations were starting to flow in, and the relationship between NHSE/NHSI and the Department of Health and Social Care had ‘proven truly successful’ in mitigating significant delays in the approvals process. Equally, the ‘voice of estates’ was now embedded throughout the entire approvals process, something his team had been ‘fighting hard for’.
As regards ‘new capital’, his NHSE/NHSI team was working hard for an increase across a number of workstreams, but recognised the need to ‘be realistic’ about available monies post-COVID. ‘That said’, he and his team had been delighted to see the announcement on 2 October of 48 committed capital schemes for new healthcare facilities.
Strategy
On ‘Strategy’, the team was involved in ‘a number of emerging elements’ – including the Clinical Waste Strategy, the development of the ‘Net Zero Plan’, the Non-Emergency Patient Transport Strategy, exploring the recommendations of the GP Premises Review, and an enhanced and improved working relationship between NHSE/NHSI and the NHS property companies, NHSPS and Community Health Partnerships. He added: “There is also the launch of the root and branch Food Review and the outcomes, enhancement of the disposals pipeline, and determining the most suitable time to refresh and review the system-wide estates strategies undertaken in 2017 and 2018.” In concluding – before Pete Sellars put to him a wide range of questions submitted as the webinar progressed – Simon Corben said: “I hope I have given
you a snapshot of our busy, but exciting, agenda. My one regret has been being unable to get out and see senior EFM professionals and their teams, and to thank them for their continued support. Let’s hope we can do that soon.”
Attendees’ questions
The remainder of an hour-long session was taken up with questions – in all over 400 signed up to this opening Digital Week presentation. Having thanked Simon Corben for ‘a wonderful start to our Digital Week’, Pete Sellars began with a question from himself. Given the importance to the EFM community of training and development, the IHEEM CEO asked if there were any especially notable initiatives or programmes planned around investment in staff training – acknowledging that the speaker had already mentioned the new Workforce Strategy. Simon Corben said that while there was ‘nothing else’ specifically on which he could give an assurance, his team was working with the ‘People’ team at NHSE to ensure that fair representation was there. Indeed, Fiona Daly, who leads this workstream, was, he said, ‘in constant dialogue’ to ensure that NHS EFM professionals were fairly represented on both training and development. He added: “Our current system is quite disjointed, and I would like us to be able to self-generate our own training budgets and protect them, to ensure we can manage them as a community.” Via the HIP programme, the team was also looking at how it could incorporate obligations with suppliers to ensure apprenticeship engagement in the building and subsequent running of new healthcare facilities.
Greater flexibility over spending timing
The Nightingale Hospital Exeter, built by BAM, was created virtually ‘from scratch’ in an old Homebase DIY store. In all 468 people worked on site at peak.
30 Health Estate Journal November 2020
Another attendee asked, given the recent substantial investment in the NHS, whether there was anything specific that Simon Corben’s NHSE/NHSI team could do, working with the Treasury, to assist Trusts allocated, say, an ‘extra’ £20 m to spend by the financial year end, in gaining more flexibility. Simon Corben said the announcement that the 48 new hospital schemes had been split over two Spending Reviews had shown ‘some of the signposting’ of NHSE / NHSI getting its message across here. He elaborated: “We recognise that it is far more effective for the healthcare estates community to get into a rhythm of expenditure with delivery of capital year-by-year. We simply can’t manoeuvre and mobilise quick enough, and when we do, we often trip ourselves up. It’s something we as a team nationally are trying to impress upon HM Treasury – that there is a better way of delivering capital solutions across the NHS.”
©BAM
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