The complete picture

What pieces of the jigsaw are needed to make estate transformation successful and where is it happening?

Engagement

“My experience from working after the Weybridge fire, and trying to plan the rebuild, is that key to that is public engagement,” said Karen.

Perhaps the most important factor, though is engagement from all stakeholders, including the public.

“The statutory duty sits with the CCGs, so to enact those plans around hub and spokes means significant public engagement in each of the patches, which in itself is a big piece of work. Then you have to get through planning and other elements.“I’m sure you all know people are attached to places, so it’s really important for planning to engage the population way ahead of consultation, so they’re engaged all the way through, and you win hearts and minds.”Using dataKarl stressed just how important effective use of the data available can be in planning effective transformation.“What I don’t want to do is build on a whim. I want to build based on evidence. We are capable of gathering and aggregating and analysing that data, which allows us to present in a business case.Evidence means we need to understand the patient movement, the clinical capacity planning, the clinical resource, both at the primary and secondary care levels. And we need to understand the buildings, what we have, what we don’t have, are they fit for purpose, and what needs doing to improve.”

Our thanks go to our expert panellists, all of whom gave us some valuable pointers about the direction that health estate transformation will take over the next few years and what factors will drive that transformation.