As the saying goes, ‘when you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp’. For NHS estates teams, that tension between firefighting and long-term planning is all too familiar. In this article, Paul Mercer, Stephen Wright, Suzanne MacCormick and Anisha Mayor explore how the Strategic Estates Management Advisory Platform (SEMAP) is helping professionals look beyond the day-to-day, tackling issues from PFI handbacks to digital transformation, and healthcare planning with a strategic lens.
As an estates professional, do you have a list of priority jobs and actions? So, arriving in the office on Monday morning with every intention of dealing with them in order, what happens? Stuff happens — and by the end of the day, the list is untouched, while plenty of other tasks have taken its place.
Another question — Do you and your team/colleagues have a clear 'strapline' that guides you every day? Something simple which opens into the aspirations for the long term?
In every walk of life, there are only two types of tasks — maintenance and new work. In the NHS, the interminable waves of stuff that come at us are almost always maintenance or, more simply, firefighting. This scenario may be an oversimplification but is to be found in most organisations, not just healthcare.
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