Webinar 1: Driving transformation

Connecting people to services like never before

Our panelKaren Wyllie, consultant, former director of performance, assurance and planning, Surrey Heartlands ICSKaren has nearly 30 years working in health. During that time, she has led clinical governance and has overseen quality monitoring and patient experience. Recently, she led the development for NHS Seacole. All this experience means she is uniquely qualified to give her assessment of what health estates need to be fit for the future.Karl Redmond, Strategic Estates Lead, NHS Estates Delivery UnitKarl’s expertise is in estates and asset requirements. Among his specific responsibilities are issues relating to digital smart buildings and sustainability. He has won and managed a number of multi-million pound contracts in both the public and private sectors. With strategic planning at the heart of what he does, he is ideally placed to talk about the future of health estates.Neil Webster, director, Cyclo ConsultingNeil founded Cyclo Consulting in 2008. The company specialises in public sector asset management, with a view to achieving real improvement. He has worked on estate strategy and implementation plans for local government, the emergency services and the health sector, and is expert in public sector collaboration. The discussion began with a run-down from Karen on what the main drivers for change will be in the coming years.Chief among those is digitisation, which will play an essential role in easing the pressures that the health service faces.Karen said: “In five years’ time, everyone is going to have a right to an online consultation with their GP. We will be focusing our attention and investment on integrated out-of-hospital services, and reducing dependency on hospitals. All of these have an impact on estates.”

Drivers for change: What are the key drivers in health services and what lessons have been learned from COVID-19 that will influence change?

“We know that through digital, AI and remote working, use of telehealth and telecare, that we can maximise our impact. We’ve tested it in earnest in the past few months.

I sat many years ago on the telehealth and telecare group in Surrey and Sussex, and we’ve achieved more in the past few months than we did in that whole period."

Karen Wylie

Of course, like every aspect of life in the UK, COVID-19 has had a major impact on the health sector over the past year. Particularly on the long-term plans that were put in place, prior to the crisis.“Delivery and investment have accelerated as we responded to the COVID pandemic,” said Karen. “When we talk about the massive investment through COVID, it’s almost a really big up-front investment in trying to achieve the long-term plan objectives very quickly, because we had a specific challenge that we were all working to.”

How are health and wellbeing policies driving local government estate strategies?

Devolved bodies will also play a big role in pushing forward health estate development in the coming years.

Neil said: “I would say that places that have a devolved state, so London, Manchester are in that place, and Surrey is on that journey, and there are others as well, plays to my point about localising as much as possible. Localising asset ownership takes away that mixed economy of centrally owned [assets].

Place-based planning and activity isn’t about a cookie-cutter approach to bringing in a model and dropping it in, it’s responding to the local population date."

Neil Webster

“We’ve also got government reorganisation going on, so we might get some unitaries, and some of those unitaries might be in some of the locations that these ICSs and STPs are operating. So we’re going to have to do some re-learning and relationship-building. We’ve also got planning reform going on, housing policy change and we’re all waiting for the outcome of the comprehensive spending review. All of those are relevant.”