APPG meeting focused on challenges post-pandemic

Meeting ‘virtually’ on 23 November, members of the recently re-formed All-Party Parliamentary Group for Healthcare Infrastructure discussed how to ensure that the UK’s healthcare infrastructure is fit-for-purpose for the short-to-medium term future, and sufficiently adaptable to cater for changing treatment pathways, clinical and technological advances, and evolving thinking on healthcare estate utilisation. Topics addressed included a lack of UK expertise in the design and planning of new healthcare buildings, rising backlog maintenance, the risks of over-focusing on, and overfunding, the acute sector at the expense of primary care, insufficient future workforce planning, and the significant variance in the quality and availability of healthcare in different parts of the UK. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Healthcare Infrastructure (APPG) is a cross-party forum that seeks to highlight ‘the importance of the physical infrastructure of health and social care’, and ‘how high-quality health infrastructure is essential to the delivery of high-quality healthcare to patients’. At the recently re-formed Group’s opening meeting, which was held via Zoom on 23 November, Chair, Conservative MP for Bolton West and Atherton, Chris Green, opened by saying how pleased he was that such a broad spectrum of parliamentarians were taking part. Alongside him as Chair, these included Vice-Chairs, Karin Smith MP, Theresa Villiers MP, and Conservative Life Peer, Lord Naseby, and Officers, Rt Hon Philip Dunne MP, Baroness Jolly, Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP, Nick Fletcher MP, and Peter Dowd MP. Also attending were Baroness Greengross, Baroness Hollins, and Baroness Finlay. Chris Green said the Group represented ‘a good complement of cross-party representatives’, and gave a good indication ‘of the importance and value of health infrastructure to our country’.

Aspiration to be a ‘critical friend’