Spire strategy gets backing from the top

In the past year Spire, with its CEO’s strong personal backing, has begun implementing an ambitious new engineering strategy which should provide significantly greater visibility of the condition of key assets in the short term, while in the longer term significantly benefiting the group’s bottom line. Jonathan Baillie reports.

Nigel Sharp has been Spire Healthcare’s national engineering and estates manager for just over a year, having immediately previously been the group’s area engineering manager for the Midlands responsible for 12 sites. He explained to me during a face-to-face discussion that the new engineering strategy had come about largely through the personal involvement of the company’s CEO, Robert Wise, who was appointed to the post in 2007 when BUPA decided to relinquish its interest in private hospitals to focus exclusively on its insurance business, selling its 25 former BUPA Hospital sites to venture capitalist Cinven. Cinven then formed a new company, Spire Healthcare, and subsequently, the following year, added to the portfolio 10 former BUPA “Classic” hospitals and the Thames Valley Hospital in Slough. Today Spire Healthcare hospitals provide a wide range of medical care and surgery, including orthopaedic, day case and coronary, from 36 sites, employing 7,600 staff, and treating over 930,000 patients annually. Having originally entered private healthcare in 1986 following an electrical apprenticeship with British Rail in Derby, Nigel Sharp initially joined the staff at the Little Aston Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, where he is based today, in 1986, as a “hands-on” maintenance engineer. Subsequently also working at a number of other local private hospitals, he returned to Little Aston to become engineering manager covering the site and Parkway Hospital in Solihull in 1999. Here he studied for, and gained, a firstclass honours degree, before being appointed area manager for the Midlands and, in July last year, Spire Healthcare’s national engineering and estates manager. He explained: “As a life-long engineer I have always been passionate about engineering, and have to say that, while at times a hospital engineer’s job in a private hospital can be pretty stressful, particularly as you do not typically have access to the resources you would on a large NHS site, the rewards, job satisfaction-wise, are immense.

CEO’s keen personal interest