How healthcare estates and facilities teams can best respond to the challenge of maintaining a safe, clean, and secure patient and staff environment at a time when not only are capital budgets being severely squeezed, but, in one headline speaker’s words, “the NHS is facing some of the most farreaching changes in its history”, was the major focus of both the presidential address, and the two keynote speeches – one of which also considered the case for “evidence-based” design – at this year’s Healthcare Estates conference and exhibition in Manchester. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.
Opening this year’s IHEEM Annual Conference and Exhibition at its new venue, Manchester Central, the Institute’s CEO John Long told delegates proudly that Healthcare Estates 2010 was the first conference event to be held at newly completed facilities within the city centre conference location. This year’s conference was also, he stressed, 25% larger than its 2009 counterpart, with nearly 50 speakers, while, for the first time, it would feature a new, fifth, “Facilities Management” stream, added “by popular demand”. At a time when both existing, and potential, members of professional institutes, and indeed their employers, are seeking to derive the absolute maximum from membership packages, John Long then spent a little time, fittingly, given the Institute’s current focus on how it can offer better “valuefor- money” to members in the future, highlighting the benefits of IHEEM membership, not the least of which, he said, was a structured path to registration at EngTech, Incorporated Engineer, or Chartered Engineer level. Currently, he explained, around half of IHEEM’s members were registered at one of the three professional levels, a “winwin” situation not just for the individual concerned, but equally for their employer – since it had been clearly demonstrated that recruiting registered engineers represented better “value-for-money” than taking on a non-registered healthcare engineering professionals. After John Long’s brief introductory presentation, Paul Kingsmore, who was elected as IHEEM’s President in May, gave the presidential address. Director of Health Facilities Scotland since 2004, and having recently completed a 13-month stint as interim director of Health Protection Scotland, the latest IHEEM President is a particularly keen and determined champion of hospital cleanliness and safety, whose wide-ranging remit also encompasses advising Scottish civil servants with healthcare responsibility on business case planning and general estates strategy. He is a Fellow of both IHEEM, and of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering.
‘Smarter ways of working’
Covered in his address were topics ranging from the need for EFM personnel to “find new, smarter ways of working” as the healthcare sector faces both increasing financial austerity, and a scenario where patient care is expected to increasingly migrate from “traditional” acute settings to primary care and community facilities, to the need to attract “new blood”. Paul Kingsmore began, however, by re-emphasising the need for estates and facilities teams to strive to continue to provide high quality, clean, safe, and secure environments – indeed of a considerably higher standard than existed across some the existing estate – a goal he said was likely to be even more taxing at a time when capital budgets would, at best, remain static.
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