Plans now well into implementation, to transfer ownership, this April, of the assets and buildings formerly owned by Primary Care Trusts on their abolition to a new limited company, NHS Property Services, have naturally aroused considerable interest across the healthcare estates community.
At last October’s Healthcare Estates 2012 conference, Simon Holden, who was appointed Chief Executive of the new Government-owned company in August 2012, explained ‘how the organisation will work in practice’. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Simon Holden, who, immediately prior to taking up the role as head of the new NHS Property Services Company, was finance director for the NHS Cheshire, Warrington, and Wirral Primary Care Trust ‘cluster’, began his conference address by reiterating the comments of a number of previous speakers about the ‘sheer size’ of the NHS. He said: “A speaker yesterday said the service in England spends around £7.3 bn a year on maintaining its estate, and has an annual footfall of over one million people a day. “One of the other key conference themes,” he continued, “has been the important contribution that property makes in terms of a good healing environment. Good healthcare buildings certainly do play a significant part in speeding patient recovery.”
The ‘scale’ of transfer
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