A spotlight on FM

Conferences provide us with an opportunity to meet with our peers from around the country and to hear presentations on some of the leading and most relevant topics of the day. But there is always the problem of balancing time away from the office with the benefits of attending. While some shows are purely exhibitions these healthcare based events combine high quality speakers and topics with meaningful and focused exhibitions allowing us to tie the information imparted with the commercially available solutions and support to help us implement and so improve the healthcare environment.
    
The last three weeks have been somewhat manic! From the 19-21 June I was in London for the Health Estates and Facilities Management Association (HefmA) Conference and then almost all of last week was spent in Glasgow at the Association of Healthcare Cleaning Professionals (AHCP) Conference. Prior to and between, much time is spent ensuring that all the necessary bits and pieces for us to be properly represented at these two important events are in place and that my staff team and contract partners know what is expected of them. While not pleading any special consideration I do know that I am fortunate that my role requires that I attend these events and so they are a core part of my day to day job as well as being really informative and enjoyable, if somewhat hard work and tiring.

Know your audience
In writing this article I am hoping to encapsulate some of the flavour of the two past events and provide a meaningful pointer to the two that are later in the year. Perhaps one of the most obvious questions about the events is “why?” Why do we have four healthcare facilities related conferences? Why do we not have one large event covering all the interests? These are difficult questions to answer so perhaps putting the events and their target audiences into view might help broaden our understanding.         

Firstly, it has to be noted that there are more than the four events I am covering in this article; there are also Conferences for the Hospital Caterers Association and The Society of Hospital Linen Service & Laundry Managers and I am sure that there may well be others of which I am not aware.
    
Each conference is targeted at its own association or organisation membership and topics covered and speakers invited reflect the management level and specific areas of interest of the delegates. HefmA as the Facilities Association tends to attract the director and senior manager for facilities from NHS bodies and also deals with the more strategic and board level topics. AHCP has much more of a mix of staffing levels from the occasional director to the domestic supervisors (some of whom were sponsored by Branches this year), and also reflects the commercial membership of the association.
    
Obviously the content tends to focus very much on cleaning and related issues. Flourishing FM is the conference of the Healthcare Facilities Consortium and attracts a range of staff from directors of facilities through middle line managers of estates and facilities and leans towards management and information based topics in its programme. Healthcare Estates, the conference of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering and Estate Management (IHEEM), is the largest of the four and has probably only about 20 per cent of its delegates drawn from the NHS. It is interesting to note that while the topics covered are very varied some key items may well appear at all four events, but with presentations tailored to best inform the delegate profile.
    
So – with a bit of background covered, what is on the agenda for this year?

The HefmA Conference
The HefmA Conference last year was held in the West Midlands and, apart from a poor exhibition layout (due to the building shape) and problems with some delegates and exhibitors having to be housed in other hotels away from the venue, was excellent. The London Branch had a hard act to follow and this was fully acknowledged in their planning and execution. For 2009 the conference was held at the Park Inn Hotel at the entrance to Heathrow Airport and the theme for the two day event was “The future of healthcare delivery: an international EFM perspective.” There will be full reviews of the event in HefmA’s own magazine so I will restrict myself to those points that really caught my attention.
    
The first core session was “Delivering world class healthcare facilities and services” and it was obvious from other delegates’ comments that my choice of speaker of the day was not misguided; Trevor Payne, director of facilities at University College London Hospital, really threw down the gauntlet in a positive and affirming manner.
    
Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson spoke with great authority on “Overcoming the obstacles to world class performance” and had clearly either been exceptionally well briefed or really done her homework as she addressed some of the issues around hospital design and architecture and the impact that these have on service delivery. Oh and yes, she did speak about her experiences as a paralympic athlete but used this as a pointer to developing and utilising team work to overcome obstacles. I get the feeling that we may well be looking to her examples as we face up to the almost certain reductions in budgets in public sector funding in 2011.
    
With some 180 delegates and an exhibition of 51 stands spread through four areas of the hotel, this high quality, medium-sized event covered everything you would expect, from sustainable engineering provision through to the Patients Association.

Excellent feedback
Paul Lloyd, from the Focused FM stand, noted: “This year’s exhibition was very well organised and designed to allow sufficient circulation space for each exhibitor. We found the exhibition was busy for a good amount of time and the hotel was of a high standard and easily accessible. We certainly got a lot out of the conference again this year and look forward to next year’s event in Harrogate.”
    
Area four of the exhibition was away from the main exhibition and covered the HCAI Technology Innovation Programme outputs. Paul Cryer, the programme manager, spoke with immense enthusiasm on this during the morning of day two. On day one the big buzz in the main exhibition hall was around the Focused FM stands as they had the Focused FM TV crew in filming key speakers and delegates on behalf of HefmA London for this new and innovative web based TV channel. A video summary of the HefmA conference is already on the web site at www.focused-fm.tv.
    
As with most of these events the gala dinner included a charity fundraiser and over £4,200 was collected for Born Too Soon, the charity of the Kingston Hospital Neonatal Unit.         

Allan Morley, assistant director of Business Development (Estates & Facilities) at Surrey & Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust and Conference Secretary for HefmA 2009 said: “HefmA London Region was delighted to host this years 12th Annual Conference at the Park Inn, Heathrow. Following the event the feedback from delegates, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors alike was that this was an extremely successful event. The international speakers were of the highest calibre and everyone has taken some learning back to the workplace.”
    
“Born Too Soon were thrilled to be chosen as the events charity and overwhelmed with the amount raised which will be invaluable in supporting their work at Kingston Hospita,” he added.

AHCP Conference
The AHCP Conference is a very different event. Firstly the AHCP includes commercial organisations and suppliers in its corporate membership and so the delegate profile is very varied in width as well as depth as already noted.
    
This year the Crown Plaza in Glasgow’s growing conference sector was the venue and the first thing to note is that yes – this was pretty well in the middle of a large redevelopment area with roadworks going on all around. The reversing bleepers on the stone wagons under my bedroom window from 06:00 definitely added something to the event!
    
As an exhibitor it is great when you are greeted and given every assistance necessary to ensure the smooth set up of the stand and at this conference not only were the organisers on the ball but the hotel had a dedicated member of their staff to ensure nothing went astray.
    
The conference itself runs over two days but spread across three (Wednesday pm through to lunch on Friday) and covers a huge range of topics and also included an international perspective this year. Being on the stand for most of the first two days I was not able to sit in on many of the formal sessions but one thing that struck me as excellent was the presentation of business plans from two of the branches (Wales and Scotland) in a competitive format with awards made on the last day.

Keeping clean
The final morning included the formal launch of the updated Healthcare Cleaning Manual with Vicki Finlay from the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) describing how the process to update the Manual had been run in conjunction with the service through AHCP and Paul Kingsmore, CEO of Health Facilities Scotland, launching in parallel the NHS Scotland National Cleaning Specification.
    
The Thursday saw two very interesting presentations both relating to innovation but in seriously differing ways. Session one of the day saw Allan Crooks from the Carbon Trust talking about how we can all be involved in reducing our facilities carbon footprint but he was followed by Mike MacKay, Contract Director from Serco, talking about “the growing use of technology within the healthcare environment”. This was not the dry presentation you might think and included a number of really interesting video clips as well as lots of details on the new build hospital for NHS Forth Valley which will include robots for several core FM functions.
    
Mike also outlined some of what he sees as the innovations that will lead in supporting healthcare FM and it was interesting to note that he included the Focused FM TV website in this and had a clip of David Nicholson, NHS Chief Executive, talking about the challenges of funding reductions for 2011 for the FM teams from the website. He was followed by Paul Cryer again speaking about the HCAI Innovations Programme but rather than repeating the talk from HefmA Paul had a new talk very focused on the cleaning and cleanliness aspects rather than the more strategic approach he had taken previously. The irony of these three presentations being in one morning was not lost on the delegates and the discussions afterwards clearly included things like “how do we run robots and reduce electricity consumptions?”
    
Being a member of HefmA West Midlands Branch, I attend the HefmA Conference as a delegate and leave my colleagues to represent the company in the exhibition hall while I was at the AHCP Conference as our exhibition representative. So I do perhaps get a different view of the two events, but it is interesting to see how similar (or indeed the same) topics get treated differently to the different audiences.

Flourishing FM
Looking forward the Flourishing FM Conference is again being held at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford this year after many years of conferences in education venues. Building on a very successful event last year the HFC Annual Conference for 2009 on 16-17 September has a theme of “Enhancing Estates & Facilities Information: Looking Forward – Building on the Past – Planning for the Future” and the programme includes presentations on:

• Facilities at the heart of healthcare by Health Facilities Scotland
• Developing the patient experience by Sheffield Hallam University FM Team
• Building partnership with FM to enhance patient outcomes by a senior nurse
• Workforce planning – will we have a workforce in five years time?
• Prison or pension – changing legislation in Healthcare FM by a legal team

And slightly different in content:

• Taming that scary paper monster – improving efficiency and slashing  costs via electronic estates information management systems

A “laughter therapy” session is planned for the end of day one following on from last year’s Workplace Massage as the HFC tries to encourage innovative ways of promoting the health of our own workforce. There will also be a series of Product Focus sessions as some of the exhibitors have 15 minutes to promote the best practice of their customers as examples of what can be done well in healthcare facilities or information management. The charity for this year’s event is Wish upon a Star.

Healthcare Estates
Late October sees the annual meeting of IHEEM and the Healthcare Estates Conference and Exhibition at the Harrogate International Centre. New for this year is a show within a show: This branded area located at the entrance to Healthcare Estates, features dedicated FM exhibitors, the free to attend ‘Hot on FM’ presentations and its own coffee point. ‘Focus on FM’ benefits from the support of leading organisations including the Healthcare Facilities Consortium (HFC) and the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) who are assisting the organisers to ensure the quality of content within the ‘Hot on FM’ presentation programme as well as providing unique marketing channels to generate attendance.
    
The conference itself is probably the largest healthcare related event outside of the NHS Confederation Conference and the title for this year is “The quality patient environment – maintaining the momentum”. Running in its well established stranded format the key themes are:

• Design and Construction
• Energy and Sustainability
• Patient Safety
• Estate and Premises Management

It is interesting to note that 2008 showed attendance at Healthcare Estates Conference and Exhibition was the highest achieved since the events inception attracting a total of nearly 1,600 attendees over the two days. Year on year growth across healthcare estates saw attendance up by over 26 per cent, with the conference delegates increasing by more than eight per cent and the exhibition visitors up by a 39 per cent. I am really looking forward to being at the 2009 event.
    
Apart from the excitement of meeting friends old and new these conferences provide me with a positive route to keeping up to date with what is going on in healthcare FM. The benefits I draw from them can easily be accessed by your Health Provider Organisation by ensuring that the most appropriate staff attend the relevant event(s) and also provide feedback to their colleagues through staff newsletters or notice boards on their return.
    
There is a wealth of information available to you and your team provided you are willing to invest wisely in drawing it down into your organisation in the most cost effective manner.
    
As we face difficult times ahead (when have we not?) we are certainly going to have to review more and more the cost/benefit of being away from base and no doubt the exhibitions that are often used to support these conferences will be loosing some of the exhibitors as the economic climate changes. Certainly it would be a great shame to loose any of these events but to return to the question at the start – why do we not look to see if we can merge and make better use of the reducing resources available?