Expert panel engages with lively audience

A high-level panel debate on the morning of the first day of Healthcare Estates 2015 involving Trust CEOs, IHEEM’s own chief executive, the Department of Health’s director of Estates & Facilities, and the day’s opening keynote speaker, focused on a wide range of topics of current concern to the healthcare engineering and estates community. Picking up on many of the themes raised by the managing director of Carillion Health, Mike Hobbs (see HEJ’s February 2016 issue for a full report), who had addressed delegates immediately before, the panel session saw considerable participation from an audience keen to quiz the panel members on their opinions on some of the biggest issues of the day. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Before a wide-ranging 50-minute panel session began, the morning’s moderator, Simon Corben, who is managing director and Health Sector lead at Capita Health Infrastructure, thanked Mike Hobbs of Carillion for a ‘fantastic’ opening address in which he had discussed both the definition of ‘innovation’, and how it could be used to improve the sector’s performance and enhance the quality of care at a lower cost. This message, Simon Corben believed, was an entirely apt one ‘for where the healthcare sector is today’. He told delegates he agreed with Mike Hobbs about the importance of good data, and of future estates professionals keeping up-to-date with technology, but added that the sector needed, particularly, to focus on how it managed estates performance in relation to patient outcomes. He said: “I think that will be a key metric, while I also concur with Mike Hobbs that collaboration will be essential in the healthcare landscape we will see over the next two decades. The situation we have today is something we can’t address individually; we need to share amongst colleagues in this room, and with colleagues in both the public private sectors, as well as in other industries.” 

After this short re-amble, Simon Corben introduced the panel members: Karen Baker, chief executive of a ‘vanguard Trust’, the Isle of Wight NHS Trust; IHEEM’s CEO, Julian Amey; Mike Hobbs, MD, Health, at Carillion; Dr Sue O’Connell, an ex-GP who is now chief executive of Community Health Partnerships, and Peter Sellars, director, NHS Estates & Facilities Policy Division, at the Department of Health. He then opened up the debate to questions, with Emcor’sGreg Markham, an IHEEM Past-President, opening the discussion with a question on ‘Big data’. How, he asked, would valuable NHS-generated data be made available to the widest possible audience in the future, and how would the estates and facilities community benefit?