Six steps to making your estate smarter

Arup has worked with many healthcare Trusts across the country for some years, helping them to understand how to use their estate to generate outcomes such as improved patient experience; raised clinical quality; improved patient dignity; higher staff satisfaction; and enhanced cost savings and overall productivity. Our aim in this article is to share some of this experience, and to demonstrate the common areas that a Trust can address to unlock the puzzle of planning and managing an estate in today’s climate; summarised in six key areas, these are.

Step 1: Understand the performance of your estate

Using standard survey approaches to assess the technical condition of your estate can determine which buildings should be retained or developed, but such methods do not tell you which area is more important to improve productivity, the delivery of care, clinical quality, or patient and staff satisfaction. Smarter Trusts are explicitly mapping the parts of their estate that can help to make these improvements. Combining this information with standard asset management and maintenance information can yield much clearer priorities for development, and result in a sound business case. Trusts that have implemented new maintenance models using ‘slimmeddown’ multi-skilled teams, with more, or complete, reliance on outsourced contractors, need to try to retain a holistic understanding of their estate. A fundamental element of creating and managing a ‘smarter’ estate is to understand what the whole estate delivers in terms of quality, quantity, and location. Maintaining this valuable local knowledge and understanding ensures that the operational link to help change and improve healthcare services remains.