HEALTHCARE ESTATES
four years we’ve grown by a massive 20%. I think that’s a reflection on the work we have put in at Head Office to revolutionise the Institute, and our continual drive to improve member offer and experience. Our team are highly engaged with membership
interaction and a personal level of engagement and support, something we feel very proud of and which we believe is a unique aspect of our offer as an Institute. We refer to our membership and network as ‘our IHEEM family’. Pete Sellars (IHEEM’s CEO) is always conscious of
membership benefits, and questions how everything we do will help our members. Our members fully get involved; we have over 100 volunteers – committee members that we just couldn’t exist without. In the last year we have launched our Mentoring
Scheme to support members looking for industry guidance and development opportunities around career progression, or achieving professional registration or Authorising Engineer accreditation. In terms of professional registration too, we offer our
members as much support as needed to guide them through this process and help them achieve their goal. You don’t get that with any other institutes – we may be smaller, but we offer a more personalised service. Digitally, we have made website UI improvements with some significant and exciting rolling out in the coming months, as well as updates to our MyIHEEM CPD and Mentoring recording systems. I think our wider offer is very strong, too. Our conferences, networking, and events programme, platform expertise and guidance notes – we have a pretty impressive offering across an extensive range of engineering disciplines, all within the healthcare sector. There has been a recent focus at the Institute on growing and supporting our Apprentice and Students members, as well as looking closely at how we can engage and inspire the next-generation of healthcare engineers through developing our STEM strategy. More recently, looking at the EBME (Electro-Biomedical Engineering) side of the business, we’ve just established a Medical Engineering Technical Platform, which will look at the medical devices from an engineering perspective. I see EBME as a massive growth area. If it grows to as big as I think it will be, that could have a massive impact on our membership numbers.
How is IHEEM engaging with younger professionals, students and children to ensure the next generation is represented? We’re really trying to get young people interested in healthcare and engineering early on, and getting more and more involved with the STEM agenda. We’ve delivered multiple schools workshops across a range of ages, from hospital-themed Lego challenges for younger ages, to working more closely with the UK’s newly established Maths School network presenting careers talks to their sixth-form students. In this last year we sponsored a new award at The Big
Bang Competition, and had a major presence at The Big Bang Fair at the Birmingham NEC, with the IHEEM stand being supported by 27 volunteers from eight companies across our sector. Our collaborators brought along an impressive
range of technology and ‘gadgets’ from their relevant organisations, meaning the students had access to VR for spatial planning and designing for neurodiversity, virtual reality welding, a platform game focused around electricity supply in a healthcare setting, 3D printing, coding, and robotics.
October 2025 Health Estate Journal 23
We even had one of the VR headsets, showcasing the recent IHEEM HQ redevelopment, set up by our architects so the experience invited students to virtually explore our building – and find and pet one of our team’s dog in the office. We had loads of different activities for them, but
everything was all centred around healthcare. It was a huge event – 21,000 young people. A few years ago, we sponsored the Faraday
Challenge, at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), which saw a team of six students win a nationwide competition to design a prototype to be used in a children’s hospital. When we were more recently up at The Big Bang Fair, one of the teachers from the winning Faraday Challenge team approached Pete, and told him that two young people from that team of six are now studying biomedical engineering at university. That’s the sort of thing you don’t usually find out, you don’t normally get that kind of feedback, but I think that’s a real impact. We got two young people into this sector through our sponsorship.
In terms of apprentices, we were recently at the NHS England graduate apprentice scheme up in Leeds. They brought some graduates in at leadership level, and we’re supporting them by giving the students free membership, as well as free entry to our conferences. Our apprentices and students can also frequently get free entry to conferences and events thanks to the generosity of our corporate sponsors, who often sponsor a year of free entry for these membership groups. We’ve also got the North East apprenticeship
programme, which a few years ago, after 40 years in operation, finally received funding from the government. You’ll probably find most people from estates in the North East have gone through that scheme, I think probably every director has gone through it. It’s really well received.
The estates and FM sector has traditionally been male- dominated. What steps is IHEEM taking to improve
Networking on the IHEEM stand at Healthcare Estates 2024.
The Big Bang Fair: ‘The students had access to VR for spatial planning and designing for neurodiversity, virtual reality welding, a platform game focused around electricity supply in a healthcare setting, 3D printing, coding, and robotics.’
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