Helping solve estates challenges at NHS Confed Expo
Our teams from Community Ventures and Shared Agenda attended the NHS Confed Expo in Manchester, showcasing how, as specialist health focused consultancy businesses, we can help the NHS overcome some of their biggest estates and service planning challenges.
Across the two-day conference, the team had lots of thought-provoking discussions with people representing all areas of the NHS about some of the hot topics currently facing the health service, which ranged from workforce to covid recovery, funding and infrastructure.
We asked people what their biggest estates challenges were, and the results couldn’t have been much closer…
The results are in
We knew that funding would poll high in any discussions around unlocking estates challenges, and we weren’t wrong. Most people saw funding as an enabler to tackle some of their biggest issues, with the results being split fairly evenly between the different areas we identified…
- Condition & backlog maintenance – 22%
- Supporting service transformation – 21%
- Data & digital transformation – 21%
- Journey to Net Zero – 19%
- Utilisation & optimisation – 17%
Most people would have liked the opportunity to pick more than one category, as all the challenges are important to address, and interlink – improvements in one area would help with addressing challenges in other areas.
Service transformation, data & digital and utilisation/optimisation were the most commonly linked challenges – with many people we chatted to seeing a clear interface between using data and digital innovations to enable service transformation, which in turn would lead to opportunities to better utilise the estate and free up much needed capacity.
The two-day NHS Confederation conference explored topics around healthcare transformation, innovation and technology and focused on the importance of collaboration across partners, both within and wider than the NHS.
Attracting over 5000 delegates from up and down the country, including many strategic decision makers, conversations centred around what the future of health and social care could look like and how organisations can come together to lead and drive changes through sharing new ideas and best practice. Many of the keynote speeches and discussion sessions mirrored the conversations our team had, with collaboration and innovation highlighted as essential to deliver improvements to patient experience and health outcomes. The importance of unlocking and re-distributing previously siloed resources (be that estate, workforce, or capital) was also noted in a session dedicated to the next steps arising from the Hewitt review.
In her address, NHS Chief Executive, Amanda Pritchard spoke about the vision for the future that’s needed to help the NHS address its challenges and enable its dedicated workforce to deliver improvements in patient care. Health & Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay MP also took to the main stage where he talked about the importance of technology in driving better patient care and how he wants to empower place-based decision making. He made reference to the Jean Bishop Integrated Care Centre; the first of its kind facility which provides an innovative, holistic approach to caring for elderly and frail patients with a preventative remit to reduce hospital admissions; delivered by our Shared Agenda team.
He said:
“Jean Bishop Integrated Care Centre is a fantastic example of how health and social care can come together under one roof and this type of approach should be more commonplace. The centre in Hull is a good illustration of how different services can come together in one place for the benefit of patients and is a locally led initiative that works for the geography on the ground.”
More about us
Shared Agenda and Community Ventures are strategic advisory partners that work with public sector organisations across the country to help unlock some of their biggest challenges through strategic estates advice, planning and delivery.
Working at system, place and organisational level, the team can support primary care, acute care, mental health and community service organisations to develop their estates plans and strategies.