New Hospital Programme Special: Designing Healthcare for the Next 60 Years

So I'm going to start with my first question to you both.

The new hospital programme is often described as a once in a generation opportunity to modernise NHS infrastructure.

From your different perspectives, clinical engineering and programme delivery, what do you see as the biggest enablers and blockers for to achieving genuinely future ready hospitals? And where does industry input make the most difference? And if it's okay, I'm going to ask Nata that question first, as you're kind of leading this program, I'm sure John will be able to come in with lots of useful content as well.

Oh, I was hoping John to say that and I could cheat and then use some of his answers.

Now, as you mentioned, Sally, it is once in a generation opportunity.

And again, as you correctly mentioned, it's not just about construction programme.

If you were just going to build...

in place of old hospital, exactly a new one, identical.

We would do this justice for this opportunity because every hospital we built isn't for today, it's for the next 60 years.

Imagine the hospitals which were built between 60, 100 years ago to now.

They were never built for the The way of working we do now, the model of care, the digitization, all of that.

And then we are constantly trying to patch and add and change.

So one of the things we are trying to do, probably one of the biggest challenges is to ensure the hospitals we are building is ready for the next 60 years.

Part of it is gathering intelligence from industry, as you just said.

Part of it is... holding a glass globe in your hand and trying to decide where the future is moving towards.

But I think for me, it's four major enablers around this program.

One is the standardization.

And by that, I don't mean building identical hospital.

It's removing unnecessary variation, which can improve quality, reduce cost, and accelerate delivery.

And then thinking about technology and equipment from day one, so often equipment is thought about as a shopping list at the very end of a project.

However, equipment has a major impact on, from the day one of thinking, from the model of care.

If we are left shifting our care to the community and we are providing more complex care in our acute, that's a direct impact on the type of equipment we are going to use and choose.

And so it's from the model of care, from the initiation of the project and thinking about building all the way through the design, because every corridor you build needs to accommodate your equipment.

Every room you build needs to accommodate your technology and throughout the life cycle of the build.

activation and operationalizing this hospital.