Overcoming key barriers to EFM knowledge-sharing

Best practice and know-how are often hard to share effectively among NHS EFM departments – due both to organisational, social, and political barriers, and a lack of an effective overarching strategy for knowledge dissemination. A team from the University of Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (EDC) and Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) is investigating how best to overcome these barriers and enable effective knowledge flows among such professionals. Carl-Magnus von Behr, a PhD researcher at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), Professor Tim Minshall, the inaugural Dr John C Taylor Professor of Innovation at the University, and head of the Institute for Manufacturing and its Centre for Technology Management (CTM), and John Clarkson, Professor of Engineering Design, present the first results from the initial research stages.

Hospitals are in a state of continuous flux and change as a result of a variety of influences – ranging from chronic stresses such as demographic changes, new care models, and a ‘Net Zero’ carbon target by 2040, to various adverse events. These pressures are forcing such healthcare facilities to operate resource-efficiently while preserving resilience against adverse events. In Health Building Note (HBN) 00-07, the NHS defines resilience as ‘the ability of an organisation to adapt and respond to disruptions, whether internal or external, to deliver organisationally agreed critical activities’. 1 Although there is no universal definition of resilience in academic literature, most researchers emphasise the need for ‘diverse capacities of a healthcare system that allow it to maintain the delivery of high-quality care during and after events that challenge, change, or disrupt its activities, by engaging people in collaborative and coordinated processes that adapt, enhance, or reorganise system functioning in response to those events’. 2

Characteristics resilient NHS EFM services need in the face of change