Capital programmes and backlog maintenance

Delivering clinical excellence underpins all the work we do across primary care estates. Behind this sits a number of key drivers such as clinical capacity, flexibility of space, accessibility and digital pathways. We utilise this information to inform the planned maintenance profiles and survey programmes we undertake, including space utilisation and room occupancy, to the facilities contracts that maintain each site.

We now provide a 360 degree service around the primary care estates and we continuously review our service offer so that is helps estates teams futureproof their facilities. This is supported across healthcare planners, change and programme managers, HTM experienced designers, whole life cost and facilities management consultants. We have surveyed over 10,000,000 square metres of primary care facilities on behalf of NHS England, the PCN, the ICS, devolved administrations, NHS Property Services, and LiFT co’s.

Looking forward there will be more healthcare staff working in and with GP practices. This will include more GPs, nurses and 20,000 additional pharmacists, physiotherapists, paramedics, physician associates and social prescribing link workers (social prescribing link workers can support patients with their wider health and wellbeing, connecting people to community groups and services for practical and emotional support).

These bigger teams of staff will work with other local services to make sure people get better access to a wider range of support for their needs. New community health teams will provide support to people in their own homes to keep them well and out of hospital. There will be an expansion in the number of services available in local GP practices including better services to diagnose people, physiotherapy and outpatient clinics that have previously only been available in hospital. A single easy-to-use NHS App and ‘digital’ GP consultations will make services more convenient including advice to help people stay well and manage their own health.

This increased occupancy means that operations in live environments needs to minimise disruption to clinical services and the works themselves need to increase the capacity and clinical impact of each facility.