NHS Property Services recently released their NHS Estate Optimisation Guide which is a comprehensive document outlining strategies on “How to get the most out of your healthcare spaces”.
Effective space management, or portfolio management, is the bedrock of ensuring NHS estates efficiency. Unfortunately, space management systems and the teams that run them are often secondary to the more immediate demands of maintenance management systems. The constant daily stream of reactive and planned maintenance work can understandably absorb the attention of estate teams, leaving little time to ask the question: “do we actually need these buildings we are maintaining?”
Core, flex and tail
Property Services’ own survey revealed the worrying if not surprising insight that “almost 9 out of 10 NHS leaders have a low-medium awareness of current space utilisation across their estate.”
The guide discusses how Trusts can better understand their estate and create a strategy for optimising it. The most accessible of these is a strategy of categorising space (buildings) as core, flex or tail.
Core: essential buildings that are critical to delivering long term services.
Flex: buildings that are currently providing unique access to services but may not be needed in the long term.
Tail: sub-optimal buildings that should be phased out when alternative estate is available.
Visualising the data
One of the key features of our solution, QFM Space, is its flexibility around the data that it can both store and visualise.
It’s simple to upload this information, which can then be shown as a shaded layer over the site plan. In this example we can see Kettering General Hospital with colour codes on the site plan according to the strategic interest of each building.
It’s easy to see how something as simple as this can help leadership visualise the current condition of the estate and plan strategies to move forward.
This is especially true when other data such as lease dates and costs, or maintenance and hazard data stored in QFM Space and other systems is also overlaid.
A high maintenance or under-utilised building at the periphery of the overall estate, or in a location that poorly serves the community, may be best slated for disposal. A similar building in the centre of a congested site may warrant refurbishment or even rebuild.
The core, flex and tail data used in this example demonstrates the issues of an ageing portfolio whilst still highlighting where the more satisfactory buildings sit within it. The exercise also demonstrated other avenues to discuss around the creation and collection of data.
The challenge of incomplete data
The NHS Property Services guide identified that “55% of those surveyed said a lack of complete data to make informed decisions was their biggest challenge in optimising space.”
This is a common issue with the root cause; in our experience, often the challenges being the difficulty and cost of collecting and generating the data, as well as having a concise and meaningful way to display it. We will be making some resources available to assist Trusts to collect this data, both with practical solutions such as QFM Space data survey tools as well as our history of working with occupancy sensor systems. In addition, Trusts can also leverage data such as using planned maintenance estimated vs actual costs, and reactive maintenance logs to identify high maintenance and failing buildings.
The Guide identified that “Over half [of NHS leaders] stated they lacked the right data to make optimal decisions, while a third lack the expertise to make the right changes to their estate.” We’d like to make it our objective to ensure all NHS leaders have the information they need.
If you would like to know more about how QFM Space can help you optimise your estate, contact us here.
