IHEEM DIGITAL WEEK KEYNOTE
Apprenticeship programme Alluding to the highly successful and long-established NHS apprentice programme in the north-east of England, the Estates director at a Trust there said he had recently learned that Health Education England funding for it would cease after 2021. Against this backdrop, would any other body ‘take up the mantle’ by supporting the workforce ‘in getting our men and women into our industry’. Pete Sellars noted that the programme, the Northern and Yorkshire NHS Assessment Centre, had been running for 43 years, and reckoned about 75 per cent of the directors of Estates in north-east England had come through it. Simon Corben said he wished the NHS had such a programme running countrywide. He added: “We were surprised by the HEE announcement, but Fiona Daly and I are looking to see how we may be able to create space to allow us to drive additional funding for the whole of the NHS for training and apprenticeship schemes.”
Here, Pete Sellars noted, on a
completely different note, that the COVID outbreak had seen the NHS starting to make decisions at a pace he had never witnessed in his career. Against this backdrop, how could the approvals process for healthcare buildings between the local and national agendas be made ‘similarly slick’. Simon Corben responded: “It was indeed inspiring to see how individuals were able to mobilise themselves so quickly, and be on site developing the Nightingales. We had the toolkit – such as the P22 framework, the transparency, and the relationships there, so were ready to go. This meant we could not only bring great teams to the fore to deliver those Nightingales, but also that the supply chains intrinsic to some of the really specialist components could quickly obtain them at a time when the country was in national lockdown.”
Speed of decision-making On the decision-making process, the speaker said: “I talked about the acceleration capital earlier – £1.5 bn of capital across that workstream, the majority approved under a programme- based approach with the Treasury, so we have the authority, both within NHSE/ NHSI and the DHSC, to be able to allocate the funds through the Memoranda of Understanding, without having to go back to the Treasury for further approval. However, we must recognise there will be some key criteria that it will look at as we develop any scheme. From an estates standpoint, there is a huge drive for modern methods of construction, and how we can do more offsite.” New schemes coming forward should also meet the Net Zero criteria, while addressing the governance and capability
32 Health Estate Journal November 2020
Leeds-based Brandon Medical turned its hand to machining and manufacturing ventilator parts to help address the increasing need for ventilators.
of teams as schemes were developed was fundamental, as were standardisation and adoption of HTMs.
With the pandemic’s ramifications for the estate in mind, Pete Sellars said ‘some of the biggest issues’ had been around the resilience and capacity of the services, such as medical gases, and the need to think about requirements going forward. He asked Simon Corben whether there would, in future, be additional ‘central focus’ on the resilience and capacity of critical infrastructure services in scenarios such as the pandemic.
One of the quickest ‘learning curves’ ‘One of the quickest learning curves’ had been ‘the disconnect’ between the EFM community, and those modelling amounts of oxygenated beds available in Trusts, ‘without the required conversations between clinicians and the healthcare engineers cognisant of how much the existing oxygen infrastructure could actually deliver’. Simon Corben hoped this relationship was ‘now far more enhanced’, while ‘significant sums’ had been invested in oxygen infrastructure. He asked:
“Looking forward at modelling oxygen supply in new-builds, do we take the approach deployed at ExCeL London, with a constant flow of 10 metres per minute at each and every port, to take away the pressure drops we were seeing elsewhere in the country? That is a question to debate – do we put in infrastructure that, in the event of a pandemic, allows us to increase the capacity by bringing in a new VIE to park alongside existing infrastructure. It is key that, in future, we don’t overload our beds with patients requiring different types of oxygen therapy.” Later in Digital Week there was a dedicated webinar on medical gases ‘post and pre-COVID-19’. On a different topic, an attendee asked why, of the 40 new hospitals commissioned, other than two mental health units, the remainder were acute facilities, and how that ‘equality of investment’ in physical and mental health could be better achieved. Simon Corben said that, ‘reading the small print of the announcement’, there were eight hospitals not named representing mental health. He was hopeful his team could
New Vacuum Insulated Evaporator plant at the NHS Louisa Jordan Hospital in Glasgow (inset), created via the conversion of the city’s SEC Exhibition Centre.
©AECOM
©Brandon Medical
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