President-Elect looks to the challenge ahead

HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, met Greg Markham in London to find out more about his professional background, career, and interests, talk through the key challenges he believes healthcare estates and engineering personnel will face as the NHS enters a new era, and discuss how he plans to use the experience and expertise gained during an extremely varied 25-year career in estates and facilities management and engineering – both within and outside healthcare – to good effect in the new role.

Beginning an interesting and forthright hour-long discussion with me, in which his enthusiasm for the estates and facilities profession, and his excitement at being IHEEM’s President-Elect, shone through, Greg Markham began by telling me a little about his initial training, and his career to date, and the strengths and skills he feels his varied public and private sector experience has given him. He first joined the NHS in 1990, he explained, following an apprenticeship with Yorkshire Water, as a member of the estates team at Bradford Hospitals. He took up the role about a year before the organisation assumed NHS Trust status – one of the ‘first wave’ of NHS Trusts in England – based at Bradford Royal Infirmary. He said: “I had previously completed a year of ‘A’ level study, but not wishing to go to university, and wanting to earn, I undertook a multi-skilled apprenticeship in the water industry. This happened somewhat by chance, because it happened to be a sector in which apprenticeships were available. Ironically, having given up ‘A’ level study, I then spent a year back at college during the apprenticeship at Huddersfield Technical College, where I undertook the ‘old’ Electrical Installation Certificate Course, subsequently gaining both ONC and an HNC qualifications. It was part way through the HNC course that I joined the Bradford Royal Infirmary – at 22, one of the youngest estates officers they had ever had.”

Working and studying simultaneously