ESTATE PLANNING AND STRATEGY
A new midwifery unit and birthing centre at Lowe House Health Centre in St Helens has helped reduce pressure on local hospitals by offering alternative birthing options for families in the local community.
have shown us that they are happy to access testing and vaccine services pretty much anywhere – a shopping centre, a football stadium, at drive-through locations, and many more.
Preventing ICUs from being overwhelmed A great example of this is the work during COVID by gbpartnerships – a leading investor and developer in health and social care. As the pandemic began to gather pace, it became clear that ICU facilities around the country could be quickly overwhelmed, so the gbpartnerships team worked closely with NHS partners to develop plans to add capacity in step- down beds, allowing patients to be shifted out of ICU as soon as possible. gbpartnerships worked across a range
of sites, including a major sports facility, where plans were quickly developed to create 350 beds on site, to be delivered in just six weeks. The beds were created in a combination of temporary structures and retrofitted existing accommodation, and, by making use of the venue’s commercial catering facilities and ample toilet facilities, the key partners were surprised to discover how amenable a hospitality and event building was to adaptation for inpatient use. Examples like this not only show the ingenuity of estates professionals, but also the possibilities that exist by looking beyond just the health estate. This could, and should, be a real step-change for future decision making about how and where we locate health services, and is a chance to tackle not just health priorities, but also wider goals such as ‘levelling up’. For example, it is easy to see how using empty retail space for health services would not only be of huge benefit to local communities, but could also help to reinvigorate our high streets.
Firm foundations to tackle whatever comes next Clearly, the pandemic has had a profound
impact on the NHS, and to paraphrase Dickens, it has been ‘the best of times and the worst of times’ for the health sector – the worst of times because we saw an unprecedented health crisis stretch the NHS to its very limit and where, sadly, many people lost their lives. However, it was also a period when we saw the NHS, its staff, and buildings, at their very best, going above and beyond to deal with unprecedented challenges, and adapting to every twist and turn of the pandemic to keep supporting patients throughout. For very obvious reasons, there is a
desire to put the pandemic behind us, but from crisis comes opportunity, and it would be a mistake not to take the lessons learned from COVID and use them to help shape decisions about the health estate of the future. For those of us in the primary care sector in particular, the pandemic showed the extraordinary flexibility and resilience of our existing buildings, and the need to build this flexibility into future primary care provision so that any new investment in ‘bricks and mortar’ is futureproofed. It also showed us the strength of the public and private sectors working in partnership to make changes at record speed, and how the private sector still has a vital role to play in the health sector, not just from a financial point of view, but also because of the expertise, skills, and resources it brings.
Changing mindsets Perhaps most profoundly, the changes we saw during the pandemic have further shifted mindsets about what the primary care estate could and should be used for. The face of primary care is changing, with a ‘blurring of the lines’ between what services should be in major hospitals, and where the opportunities lie to move them into the community by making better use of capacity in the primary care estate. With these changes, challenges, and opportunities will come a need for us as health estates professionals to also adapt
our mindset and our ways of working, but everyone involved in the NHS estate has already shown what we are capable of. Just as our buildings were able to adapt to the huge pressures of the past two years, so too were the thousands of estates professionals able to rise to the challenge presented by COVID, and play their own vital role in supporting the NHS and local communities. The sector should rightly be proud of what it has achieved throughout the pandemic, and use it as a firm foundation to give us the confidence and momentum to tackle whatever challenges come next.
Sarah Beaumont-Smith
Sarah Beaumont-Smith is the CEO of Fulcrum Infrastructure Group – the private investor in over 40 healthcare centres delivered in partnership with the NHS through the NHS LIFT programme. She joined Fulcrum in 2009, and brings more than a decade of experience in investing in quality community healthcare facilities. In 2020 she was also elected as Chair of The LIFT Council – the representative body of investors in the NHS LIFT Programme.
October 2022 Health Estate Journal 103
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