People central to effective estates strategies

A new report from the Nuffield Trust has stressed that any successful estates strategy within the NHS must focus and revolve around people, so that services can become more efficient.

Developing robust estates strategies: Challenges and opportunities provides an overview of the challenges facing most health and care systems in developing integrated estates strategies, as well as suggestions to enable local systems to deliver a health and care infrastructure that is sustainable and fit for the future.

The report claims that effective systems ensure that ‘people with the right skills and experience work in an environment that makes it easier for them to do their job properly’ and uses their combined estate as a ’significant enabler to health and care staff working in partnership’. This is targeted towards and drives towards improved experiences and outcomes for patients.

Additionally, employed staff, who have a deep understanding of the benefits that can be realised through partnerships with local authorities and industry, are therefore able to work with advisors that bring creative solutions to well understood challenges.

With building and infrastructure recognised as key enables to the delivery of better care, as well as essential to delivering sustainable efficiencies, the Nuffield Trust has outlined nine challenges to local systems: creating the environment to craft effective estates strategies; future proofing; demand is growing faster than the resources available; capital funding; governance; primary care; improving what we already have; approvals; and the public engagement and consultation challenge.

Writing in an accompanying blog post to the publication, report author Helen Buckingham states that having a strategy that focuses entirely on the technical aspects of the location, size and funding of buildings, ‘seeking to fit an off-the-shelf solution to a complex local problem’, is likely to fail. Instead, successful strategies are dependent upon connecting ‘with the needs and potential of the population they serve’ and the staff they employ.

Alongside Buckingham, the Developing robust estates strategies report was written by Sarah Harvey and Laurie McMahon, directors of the Realisation Collaborative.