New President sets out priorities for his term

One of very few private sector employees to have served as IHEEM President, Greg Markham BEng (Hons) CEng FIHEEM MIET MBIFM serves, in his ‘day job’, as technical services director at G4S Integrated Services (UK), with overall responsibility for some £350 million worth of lifecycle portfolio. He first joined the NHS in 1990 following an apprenticeship with Yorkshire Water, as a member of the estates team at Bradford Hospitals, about a year before the organisation assumed NHS Trust status. His career has subsequently seen him gain wide-ranging experience in areas including estates and facilities management, project direction, and operations management, in a combination of public and private sector roles. A firm advocate of PFI, he gained senior-level experience of the financial model on some of the earliest PFI schemes. Greg Markham is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of IHEEM who has been on the IHEEM Council, and has served as chair of the Institute’s Membership and International Committee for the past two years. After the Institute’s Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ending 31 December, 2011 were unanimously accepted at the 2012 AGM, IHEEM CEO, Julian Amey, formally announced that Greg Markham would commence his two-year Presidential term at the completion of the meeting.

Outgoing President’s thanks

In his closing remarks, IHEEM’s President for the past two years, Paul Kingsmore, thanked all who had worked with him, and especially IHEEM’s‘re-vamped’ Council, which he said was now ‘really showing its ability to work as an effective organisation’. He also thanked the Committee chairs, and IHEEM’s members, whose support he said had been ‘very encouraging’, and praised IHEEM’s head office staff for their ‘tremendous work’. Performing his last duty as President, he said: “I am absolutely delighted to be handing over the chain of office to Greg Markham, as I know he will do a fantastic job at a time when this organisation is now going forward in a better position than it has ever been before.” He then handed over the Presidential chain to Greg Markham, who described taking over the Presidency as ‘a true honour and a privilege’, and thanked Paul Kingsmore for ‘steering the Institute through two and half years of turbulent times’. Greg Markham confirmed that he would give his first address as President at the conclusion of the show the following day. His first keynote would, he said, include mention of IHEEM’s new five-year business plan, a focus on membership growth, building of the Institute’s technical capabilities, and better engagement with the membership. He added: “We also need to work with other organisations; we shouldn’t see each other as threats, but instead as complementary organisations.” Finally, he presented Paul Kingsmore with a replica medal as a token of the Institute’s appreciation for his service as President. Full Minutes of IHEEM’s 2012 AGM will be published on the IHEEM website. Five-year plan In the next day’s address, speaking on the exhibition floor, Greg Markham said he wished to use his first speech as President to highlight three key areas in the new five-year IHEEM Business Plan that was formulated and agreed upon earlier this year by IHEEM’s Council: to grow membership; to engage with members, and ‘to become an influence in the industry and a single voice for healthcare estates’. Greg Markham said IHEEM needed to be ‘more business-like’ in its approach to growing membership, a strategy he believed would ‘need a sales force’. “This sounds expensive,” he said, “but it certainly doesn’t have to be, because we do have a 1,700-strong salesforce – you, the membership. You know the benefits, so tell others.” In line with this goal, Greg Markham announced that the Institute was today launching a new ‘Member get Member’ scheme, via which any existing IHEEM member proposing a potential new one would receive an Amazon voucher for each new member actually signed up. He added: “Yesterday Paul Kingsmore talked about 1% being the difference between fourth place and a Gold medal in an Olympic event; I am only asking for one new member each.”

Building influence overseas

Turning to overseas membership, Greg Markham said the Institute not only needed to work with the IFHE to build its international membership, but also to use its ‘networks and technology’ to provide ‘a credible offering to those in other countries’. Referring to the second key goal set out in the Business Plan, the new President announced that the Institute was also launching a new Young Members Group, one of a number of initiatives aimed at making membership more attractive to young professionals. The Group’s success would, however, depend on the input and help of senior members, who could both act as mentors, and pass on their knowledge and learning. He said: “We need to broaden our membership, and provide a home for neglected groups.

Embracing social media

 “We also,” he added, “need to embrace social media to help us engage with existing and potential members, and I intend to make my own contribution to this by writing a regular President’s ‘blog’.” (this first appeared on the IHEEM website on 16 October: www.iheem.org.uk/Presidents-Blog Other key steps that Greg Markham said he hoped would help increase membership included use of the Institute’s website and technical platforms to ‘add value’ for members, and a ‘quality events programme’, at both a national, and a local, level. He also plans to visit every IHEEM branch during his two-year Presidency. Moving on to IHEEM’s role as an ‘influencer’, he said the Institute needed to harness members’ technical capabilities and ‘wealth of knowledge’ so that it was seen as the ‘premier source’ of technical guidance in the sector. He explained: “We need to build on the strength of our technical platforms, and then work with the Department of Health to revise existing technical guidance.” This would, however, he stressed, mean IHEEM and its membership working with fellow Institutes and organisations, such as the BIFM, HEFMA, CIBSE, the IET, NAHFO, and IPEM, to ‘form a single voice’ He closed by thanking speakers, exhibitors, the conference and exhibition organisers, i2i Events and Step Exhibitions respectively, the IHEEM staff, and the Manchester Central team, for their input and efforts in staging Healthcare Estates 2012, and expressed his appreciation to all those who had attended the show.