Making sense of the Government’s vision

The importance to a high quality future healthcare estate of construction frameworks, integrated supply chains, and new capital funding sources, were among the topics addressed in an interesting session involving speakers from the NHS Sustainable Development Unit, the NHS Confederation, and ProCure21+, on the first morning of November’s Healthcare Estates conference. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie reports.

Opening a stimulating debate, ‘Making sense of the Government’s vision from a health, construction, and environmental perspective’, in which many of the key themes had also been raised in the preceding opening address by IHEEM President, Paul Kingsmore, was the director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit, David Pencheon OBE. He began by explaining to a sizeable audience, which participated wholeheartedly in the hour-long session and ensuing debate, that, in his view, among the most important current issues facing the NHS, private providers, and the healthcare estates and engineering community, were how to deliver the Government’s much-vaunted vision for healthcare; the business models – a number of them new – that would need to be adopted to ensure success; the part that technology would play, and how to get the most out of new partnerships between different organisations and agencies in some cases not used to working together. All this would have to be achieved against a changing political, financial, and technological backdrop, while taking careful account of the impact that any future healthcare system would have on the environment and finite resources.

 ‘Doing good now’