Planning safe, modern places for care has been a key focus this year. Our estates teams work together with finance and other colleagues to make this happen.
By working together, we have improved how we plan and manage our estate and buildings. This helps create better spaces for patients and staff, while making the best use of resources.
Delivering the Infrastructure Strategy
Last year we published the first NENC Infrastructure Strategy. The focus is on improving how we plan and invest in the NHS estate across the region. Work has continued to deliver this. This year we updated our plan in line national asks. One of our core principles is how we agree on where to invest. Our aim is to ‘level up’ the facilities we have for patients in our region.
Strengthening system collaboration
We have set up new estates subgroups to support joint working. These focus on key areas such as:
- Sustainability - making sure our estate meets our green ambitions.
- Capital and workforce - making sure we know what capital (money) and workforce we need.
- Technical services - making sure we have the right skills to run the estate.
This is helping us to be more consistent in how we approach things across our FTs. It also helps reduce duplication, so teams do not spend time doing the same work more than once. They can also share best practice more easily.
Co-ordinating capital investment
We worked closely with the ICB and NHS England to plan and coordinate capital funding for the region. We work with our FT teams to help them with business cases. This helps us know what bids we can put in when there is capital money available. It also helps us agree what we should do first. This is important as there is lots we want to do to improve buildings, equipment and services.
At the end of the year, we had a strong capital position. We spent our capital in line with the funding we had for the region.
Planning for the future
Work has started to develop plans for Neighbourhood Health Centres. This is in line with the NHS 10-year plan to move more care out of hospital. We want to make sure we make the best use of the estate and facilities we have in our region. This also means thinking about how we integrate our teams and resources.
