Regulator engagement will drive take-up

The roundtable was the first in a series IHEEM is planning to stage with the DH over the next year (a number of further such events have been held since) to promote the Model’s benefits to the estates and facilities community, and encourage wider take-up. Here we cover the ‘second half’ of this initial panel discussion and debate, and some of the interesting questions it raised.

As the afternoon session got under way, the ‘quality’ of the data available to ‘feed into’ the NHS PAM was the first major talking point. Miles Timperley, director of estates and facilities at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said that, against the new healthcare backdrop, NHS organisations were now changing, particularly in the mental health arena, to such a degree, and so fast, that trying to get comparable data to use in the Model could prove ‘quite challenging’. He said: “Previously at least there was demarcation; you had acute NHS Trusts, mental healthcare Trusts, and PCTs. Now, trying to get that transparency, with things moving in all sorts of directions for different organisations in terms of their case profile etc, is going to become ever more important.” While it was agreed that there was plenty of accurate data available on, for example, how efficiently buildings operated by acute NHS acute Trusts were running, an accurate picture as regards other types of NHS building was, the panel acknowledged, ‘considerably harder to come by’. Peter Sellars, head of profession at the Department of Health’s NHS Estates and Facilities Policy Division, said that if the team behind NHS PAM could identify what cost and spatial efficiency data were readily available nationally for mental healthcare premises, his team would gladly build this data into the Model, to enable comparisons. Currently, however, nobody could answer these questions with any degree of certainty.

Adding to the ‘rich reservoir’