Assessment scheme to be ‘patient-led’

Very much on this theme, last year’s Healthcare Estates 2012 conference in Manchester saw Dr Elizabeth Jones, head of Patient Environment at the Department of Health, and her DH colleague, Rachael Whitaker, explain how PLACE, a new system of patient-led assessment of the hospital environment, and the successor to PEAT, will come into operation this April, and how it will differ from its predecessor.

Beginning a two-part presentation, Dr Elizabeth Jones started her conference address by looking at the context within which the new PLACE (Patient-led Assessments of the Care Environment) regime had been developed. In common with a number of other speakers at last year’s IHEEM flagship annual conference, she referred to the overriding goal of the Department of Health’s Estates and Facilities Policy Division to provide ‘safe, suitable and clean environments for care’ throughout NHS and other healthcare facilities throughout England. She explained that the new PLACE inspection and assessment regime ‘went to the heart of all these areas’ in seeking to ‘make sure the care environment is right for the patient’. She told delegates: “If at any time my team is stuck on what our priorities should be, we remember some absolutely critical principles. One of the key ones, as I remember a colleague telling me when she looked at my desk stacked with heaps of paper in a former NHS Estates office, is that ‘nobody actually makes a mess; the mess just happens unless one takes steps to stop it’.” The same principle, the speaker argued, applied very much to hospital environments; unless all staff responsible worked extremely hard to make them good, they simply would not be.

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