Key challenges for the sector’s future workforce

Speaking in the opening ‘Workforce’-themed keynote at last October’s Healthcare Estates 2022 conference, Sir David Behan, Chair of Health Education England, and Nick Hulme, Chief Executive at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, gave their standpoints on some of the key workforce challenges facing both the healthcare engineering and estate management sector, and the wider NHS. They also looked ahead at some of the elements they believed would need to change. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports

Preceding the two speakers, IHEEM’s President, Paul Fenton MBE, gave a President’s Address reflecting on his past two years in the role. Appropriately – given that the two speakers who followed him discussed workforce-related issues – he gave a particular ‘thank you’ to the healthcare estates management and healthcare engineering profession as a whole – recognising all that the professionals working in the field had achieved in the past three years. He said: “It has been your tenacity, drive, determination, and unyielding hard work – in assisting our clinical colleagues in delivering those clinical services – which have saved so many people’s lives.” Paul Fenton said that during the pandemic, the ‘importance and value’ of the EFM profession had been ‘demonstrated like never before – to our patients, to our Trust boards, to our staff, and to the population we serve’. He added: “When I look back at the hard work, effort, and support, our profession has given during that time, I look proudly on the Institute which I’ve had the greatest honour to lead as President over the past two years.” 

Chair of Health Education England