HEALTHCARE ESTATES
how healthcare settings can combine these elements with the buildings, systems and workforce they have now, creating practical routes towards greater digital maturity. Within the Exhibition, the Smart Hospitals & Digital Innovation Theatre extends this conversation further. Presentations such as ‘Avoiding the Two-Tier Estate: Integrating NHP Digital Standards into Legacy Wards’, ‘Digital Maturity Across the NHS Estate: Bridging Old and New’ and ‘Mind the Gap: Bridging the Divide Between New-Build and Legacy Healthcare Estates’ focus on incremental, scalable adoption. The central message is positive: digital transformation can begin from any starting point, not just new-build projects. Healthcare Estates identifies credible, scalable pathways that organisations at every stage of maturity can benefit.
embrace digital technologies, strengthen compliance, reduce carbon emissions and extend the life and value of their assets. Healthcare Estates provides the platform to share these experiences, learn from organisations already delivering change and turn proven ideas into wider progress.
Extending digital opportunity across the estate Digital technology offers one of the clearest opportunities to improve performance across the estate. The Digital Technology and Innovation stream explores how healthcare settings can navigate differing levels of digital readiness while ensuring that technological progress benefits the entire healthcare system. The programme moves from national strategy to
practical implementation. In ‘Bridging the Gap with Digital Technology and Intelligent Hospitals’, Sarah Thomas and Eamonn Gorman from the New Hospital Programme at NHS England considering the role of digital standards and intelligent systems. Kay Mulcahy, Associate Director of National Estates Operations at NHS England, examine how the analogue-to-digital shift can advance estates maturity across the NHS. Sessions including ‘Mind the Digital Gap: Case Studies
from Embedding AI Across NHS Estates’, ‘The Digital Estates Dichotomy’ and ‘From Gap to Impact: How Collaboration and Digital Systems Improve Patient Safety’ delve into artificial intelligence, data-led decision-making and the organisational conditions needed to convert technology into measurable improvements. Technology delivers its greatest value when it is supported by leadership, culture, data quality, interoperability, investment and realistic implementation strategies. The programme provides practical insight into
Unlocking the potential of the existing estate For many, the most pressing question is not how to build a new hospital, but how to improve the buildings they already have. Healthcare Estates responds directly this this, with sessions focussing on achievable modernisation within operational facilities and on making the strongest use of available space, funding and assets. The workshop ‘Levelling Up Legacy Estates: A Practical
Roadmap for Bridging the Digital Two-Tier Divide’, led by Will Broadbent of The Wandsworth Group and Alexis Carlyon of Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, provides hands-on guidance for organisations seeking achievable routes towards greater digital maturity. Within the Estates & Facilities Services stream, topics include the use of PropTech to optimise estate performance, stronger asset information, workforce development and the implications of different ownership structures. Christopher King, Head of NHS Open Space at NHS Property Services, examines how PropTech can be harnessed to improve the NHS estate. The Exhibition programme adds further depth with presentations on upgrading existing air-handling units, achieving HTM-compliant ventilation modernisation, improving water safety and applying smart systems to older hospitals. These are the practical questions confronting estates teams every day: how to site modern equipment in constrained spaces, maintain service continuity during work and secure the greatest safety and performance improvement from available capital. The programme is designed to help teams identify workable answers and suppliers with relevant experience. The future of the healthcare estate will not be built entirely from scratch; much of it will evolve through careful adaptation, refurbishment and optimisation of existing assets. Peer-to-peer learning is therefore invaluable: it helps to understand what has worked, which approaches represent best practice and where the strongest value can be achieved. The programme places significant emphasis on solutions
that are practical, scalable and replicable across a wide range of healthcare environments, and most importantly are tried and tested.
Building resilience through governance and engineering assurance Infrastructure resilience offers a direct route to safer, more reliable and more productive healthcare environments. New facilities can incorporate modern systems from the outset, while existing buildings offer significant opportunities for targeted renewal, improved monitoring and better use of asset information - even where infrastructure is approaching its intended life or spaces
102 Health Estate Journal September 2026
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