Future guidance strategy explained

Over the past two years, however, the Department of Health has made clear that it no longer intends managing estates guidance, placing a significant onus on the estates community, the associated supply chain, and other healthcare personnel, to formulate and steer such guidance in the future. At Healthcare Estates 2012, Paul Roberts, risk management advisor and development lead on guidance strategy with the DH’s NHS Estates & Facilities Policy Division, explained how his team foresees new guidance being produced and disseminated going forward.

Paul Roberts, who has been with the Department of Health since 1985, began by reminding delegates that, back in October 2010, addressing delegates at that year’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates conference, the NHS’s deputy CEO, David Flory (who is today also Chief executive of the NHS Trust Development Authority), made clear that, in future, the Department of Health would no longer be producing estates guidance to anything like the extent it had done previously. It would thus, he said, be ‘over to an autonomous NHS, its professional advisers, and industry’, to get together to produce whatever guidance they felt was needed. In his IHEEM conference address this year, Paul Roberts confirmed that this was still the Department’s intended strategy. He said: “I can confirm that, in future, the Department will certainly not be producing guidance in the way that it has done before; therefore my intention in this presentation is to give you an idea of where we have got to, and what the future might hold, on the guidance front.”

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