TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT NextGen healthcare
RETROFIT AND THE 10-YEAR HEALTH PLAN: A NEXTGEN PERSPECTIVE
Can the NHS deliver neighbourhood health in buildings it already owns? A NextGen Healthcare Network cross-disciplinary workshop asked whether the rules help, or if they quietly get in the way. Hun Pu, Midlands Lead and Architect at Medical Architecture, tells us more.
A
imed at professionals with around 5–15 years of experience,
the network provides a platform for knowledge sharing, professional development, and building meaningful, long-lasting industry connections. We host a variety of events across
the UK, including networking socials, breakfast briefings, panel discussions, site visits, working groups, and industry conferences. Members also have opportunities to contribute to thought leadership, speak at events, and engage with some of the most influential voices shaping the future of healthcare. Whether you’re looking to expand your network, share ideas, or stay informed on the latest trends and challenges in healthcare, the NextGen Healthcare Network offers a welcoming and collaborative space to connect and grow. For more information on upcoming
events and to join our mailing list, visit
www.nextgenhealthcarenetwork.co.uk.
Where this comes from The NextGen Healthcare Network’s Regulations & Compliance Working Group brings together architects, engineers, estates professionals, lawyers, capital estates managers, and more with five to 15 years’ experience in a healthcare construction, development, or estates career. Since 2025, the group has run online sessions on a series of questions including: can regulation and compliance be made to enable good healthcare retrofit rather than obstruct it? In April 2026, with IHEEM as partner, the group put that question to 70+ ‘NextGenners’. The evening combined a guidance update from NHS England, live polling, a panel of three senior speakers, and discussion at seven tables:
• Regulations & Guidance • Compliance & Assurance • Risk & Decision-Making • Retrofit Design & Delivery • People & Behaviour • Acute Estates • Neighbourhood Integration.
The speakers
The evening was anchored by a guidance update and a panel of three fantastic speakers:
• Helen Griffin, Master Plan Lead at NHS England
Scan here for the Next Gen Eventbrite page, or click the link below
www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/next- gen-healthcare-networking- forum-77223082953
• Paul Fenton MBE, Business Development Director, IHEEM
• Louise Shiels, Partner, Brodies
The speakers came from different professional positions and brought differing views on where the greatest barriers to delivery lie. Those differences helped spark a lively, candid discussion which carried through to the seven table sessions and shaped the findings that follow.
14 Health Estate Journal November 2026
Why retrofit is the story The New Hospital Programme, at around £37 bn, is the largest NHS capital investment since 1948. It covers approximately 2.3 per cent of an estate of roughly 27 million m². With a drive for community clinics, ageing acute wards, and converted retail units to be adapted as a route to meeting stringent sustainability targets, retrofit is becoming the new ‘new- build’. Retrofit is the primary mechanism for delivering the NHS Long Term Plan.
The headline finding
Having explored guidance interpretation, culture, documentation, and project timing, the workshop’s findings fell into two groups: Procedural problems occur at every stage and share one shape: a decision taken too early, on too little information, without the people who will have to live with it. Trusts commit to a building, location, and clinical use before anyone tests whether the building can support them. Record drawings are missing or out of date, so every discipline re-validates assumptions. Consultants arrive at Stage 3 or 4 to resolve what should have been raised at Stage 0. Project leads move on and briefs are reopened. Live facilities decanting was the most difficult barrier raised all evening. Structural problems sit above any project
team and cannot be fixed by a better process map.
Derogation: legitimate,
but only if owned Derogation ran through the whole discussion. Nobody argued that departing from guidance is wrong in an existing building. The distinction drawn was
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