Comment

Turning blue sky thinking into action

June’s announcement at the Health+Care Show that every English local health economy will be offered a ‘strategic estates adviser’, has been heralded as a great opportunity for better use of properties, improved services and efficiencies. Antek Lejk (pictured), Community Health Partnerships’ executive director and strategic estate planning lead, tells us more about what this offer means and what will lie at the heart of its success.

The Department of Health and NHS England have asked the two NHS property companies – Community Health Partnerships (CHP) and NHS Property Services – to provide ‘strategic estate advisers’ to every local health economy. These independent advisers, provided free to NHS bodies, will help each area make best use of local buildings, reduce running costs and identify the estate requirements that spring from commissioning plans. They provide the key to unlocking value across the NHS estate and creating the infrastructure to deliver the new community-based models of care and integrated services envisaged by the Five Year Forward View.

At CHP, our team of independent strategic estate advisers, covering 96 CCGs across England, have been appointed as part of our enhanced Strategic Estates Planning (SEP) service. They’re already out there, actively helping local health economies with planning support, implementation back-up and ways to cut red tape in order to make the most of their NHS buildings and land. They are armed with data and mapping tools for robust planning and are supported by a range of specialists who can be brought in if local systems need them, although these services do need to be paid for. They can also advise on potential ways to access additional funding.

Transforming the estate and the services delivered within it in a way that ensures land and property are used to their full potential and run efficiently, relies on a truly collaborative approach. We need strategic partnerships that bring the commissioning and provider service agendas together with the estate infrastructure, and turn them into the new model of what we do.
If we don’t do this properly we could spend a lot of time planning and not doing, so we’ve got to focus on making change happen and, while we do have to work in partnership, this should be with the expectation that we’ll get some real outcomes from it. If it’s just an opportunity for blue sky thinking, then we’re going to fail. Partnership working is hard and can often drift into being a “talking shop”. We want partnerships with a hard, pragmatic edge, focused on action and delivery. We want system-thinking, not individual self-interest. And we need to make sure we’re able to do what we say we’re going to do.

Case study: Making the best use of NHS buildings across North Manchester

CHP and North Manchester CCG have jointly funded utilisation studies that show that modern primary care centres have considerable scope to accommodate additional services and at the same time reduce the cost to the NHS – an estimated £900,000 a year – in wasted space.

The work has identified a fantastic opportunity to move services out of ageing infrastructure and into up-to-date facilities while saving money. For example, the CCG has now identified where it can locate four bases for district nursing teams plus palliative care services in community settings closer to patients’ homes.

CHP’s Strategic Estate Planning expertise has offered a good foundation for conurbation-wide thinking as Greater Manchester takes on its devolved responsibilities for health and social care.

Simon Wootton, Greater Manchester CCGs estates lead and chief operating officer at North Manchester CCG, explained: “Studying estate utilisation in north Manchester is highlighting numerous buildings – many under-used – that could provide bases for these closer-to-home services.

“In the longer run, I want to examine utilisation across all of Greater Manchester’s public sector, including the NHS, libraries, leisure centres, schools, police and the fire service. We could develop the public sector equivalent of LateRooms.com, with centralised booking facilities for meeting rooms, thus maximising use of the Greater Manchester estate.”

As in Manchester, CHP’s Strategic Estates Planning service aims to address the considerable opportunities for the NHS to:

• Use the existing estate more effectively
• Reduce running and holding costs
• Extend opening hours across the week
• Reconfigure the estate to better meet commissioning needs
• Share property (particularly with social care and other public sector partners)
• Dispose of surplus estate to generate capital receipts for reinvestment
• Ensure effective future investment.

Working with commissioners, CHP’s SEP Programme has already identified a £10m annual system saving for the NHS during 2015-16 and is looking to significantly increase this over the coming years.