President stresses need for adaptability

HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

This year’s IHEEM Annual Conference opened with a brief welcome to the event by the chairman of Institute’s North-West Branch, Alistair Cameron, who subsequently introduced Paul Kingsmore to the podium for a Presidential address in which the IHEEM President highlighted the ‘real and unprecedented change’ that both the NHS as a whole, and consequently the healthcare estates and facilities personnel charged with looking after public healthcare facilities, were facing in the light of the far-reaching proposals for change set out in what has proven a controversial Government Bill. These changes, which Paul Kingsmore felt heralded ‘one of the biggest shakeups the NHS has ever seen’, were already, he knew from his contacts in the private sector, also impacting on privatelyoperated hospitals, and were likely to place new pressures and demands on healthcare estates and engineering personnel not just in England, but equally on their counteparts in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Paul Kingsmore told the conference: “The far-reaching proposals outlined in the Health and Social Care Bill are already leading to, and could culminate even more in the future, in a level of change in the way healthcare is both commissioned and provided greater than anyone, and even the current Government, had expected, or indeed perhaps anyone had actually wanted.”

Implications as yet unclear