Our multi-billion-pound portfolio of investments will not only transform healthcare infrastructure, but also how that infrastructure is delivered. We intend to create an enduring legacy of skills, relationships, and productivity, in the industry, while maximising the socioeconomic benefits for the communities our hospitals serve. The facilities being created (40 schemes by 2030, with further schemes being invited to bid for potential future funding) will be ‘smarter’, easier to operate, and create a platform for the NHS to deliver the best care effectively and efficiently.
It is also our intention to build enduring capability – a sustainable supply chain and culture that will support renewal of the NHS estate beyond the end of this decade. We are delivering specialist hospitals, fullservice district general and women’s and children’s hospitals, and community and mental healthcare facilities in four cohorts
Good progress being made
Of the eight Cohort 1 schemes, two are already complete (the Northern Cancer Care Centre in Cumbria opened in 2021, and the Royal Liverpool in autumn 2022), and others are well advanced, such as the first phase of Brighton’s ‘3Ts’ scheme, which is due to open this year.
In addition, Moorfields’ Oriel Eye Hospital has been approved recently, and enabling work is starting at many of our 10 Cohort 2 sites. The New Hospital Programme is committing more than £2 bn to these early projects, and while Tier 1 suppliers are in place for most, significant opportunities remain for Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers to get involved
Our next cohort will scale investment many times over, as we start to deliver, creating opportunities for transformation in every single aspect of healthcare delivery – from planning to manufacturing, and also from operational changes. The way we deliver hospitals will change. Most are built as standalones, missing opportunities to benefit from scale – and our goal will be to make more of the opportunities for optimisation, modularisation, and planning. This one-off nature of projects also misses opportunities to build long-term, commercially successful, relationships and partnerships, which can lead to feelings of uncertainty in delivery, and a reluctance to invest for the long term. In turn, this creates unstable pipelines, and restricts the market’s ability to work to its true capacity.
Addressing some systemic challenges
It is clear that is we follow a business-asusual approach the market will not be able to cope with the scale of investment we are bringing in. The good news is that we recognise the many systemic challenges, and we are making some revolutionary, as well as evolutionary, changes
Our delivery strategy is based on the Government’s Transforming Infrastructure Performance Roadmap to 2030 (see https://tinyurl.com/26tbmrpp). We are a long-term, centralised programme providing the innovation, decision making, and knowledge management needed across the whole programme. This will create the confidence needed for longterm investments, and build a supply chain able to work at the required pace and volume.
Innovation on all fronts
To deliver our transformational facilities at pace we need to productionise and innovate on all fronts – from clinical strategy and design, to procurement and operational excellence.
The key outcomes we are looking for include:
Reducing development and build time through efficiencies in design, and in quantity of components.
Improving consistency by learning and refining as we repeat processes.
Adopting more of a manufacturing mindset, which will bring better whole-life performance, better health and safety, less waste, and greater sustainability, with products being built to exacting environmental standards.
Lowering risk by reducing uncertainty in the supply chain.
Opportunities for companies to make long-term investments in the capabilities needed.
Applying manufacturing sector principles
The manufacturing sector has used common components and processes, as well as mass-production of customised products, for a long time. We are now ready to apply these to healthcare infrastructure. We will create common standards and benefit from efficiencies of scale across every aspect of our schemes, from pre-construction processes and design, to construction and handover. This will be supported by a sophisticated procurement process, which will enable buying for more than one scheme or NHS Trust at a time, and Hospital 2.0 – the centralised knowledge management-led approach we have developed to span the full lifecycle of our hospitals. This builds on existing standards in healthcare, and will specify standards and requirements, including preferred approaches, engineering principles, and spatial designs. Research-based and expert-led, these will reduce pre-development costs and provide agreed and centralised ways of working.
Longer-term ambitions
Our vision and ambition for this programme – improving the supply chain, increasing standardisation, and building fully digital, intelligent hospitals that improve the environment for patients and staff – is vast – at least double its current size.
Only by changing the way we build health infrastructure through new partnerships with the market and NHS Trusts can we plan to deliver by 2030. Our market engagement teams will launch a number of procurements over the coming months, and we are actively seeking market advice and support, so please speak with us, share your ideas, and find out how we can help you to get involved. This is a transformation programme, and it will require many talents, abilities, and skills – more than are currently available.
I have two calls to action for the construction sector and suppliers: We need your best people on the case for this truly transformational programme – anything less than your A-teams will not be enough. Things will happen at pace. Act now to develop your ideas, build your factories, forge new partnerships, and find solutions.
The scale of the New Hospital Programme will call on the skills and expertise of companies of all sizes, across a broad range of sectors. Suppliers can register their interest by completing the Supply Market Survey. (at https://tinyurl.com/4fyh5vne). Alternatively, if you would like to know more about the supply chain or future market engagement activity, please email the Supplier Markets Team at nhp.suppliers@nhs.net
Saurabh Bhandari
Saurabh Bhandari is Programme director for the New Hospital Programme, leading the Delivery Directorate and the development of Hospital 2.0, the programme’s approach to building NHP schemes. Hospital 2.0 will, the NHP team says, ‘drive an accelerated programme creating transformative environments that will benefit patients and the public’. The team says: “A critical part of this system will be the ability to create prototypes to enable us to learn quickly, collaborate, and validate new, more sustainable, and safer ways of building.”
Saurabh Bhandari has previously worked for the Infrastructure Projects Authority and in the private sector, specialising in driving delivery of complex infrastructure, transport assets, buildings, and spaces, in the transport, science, healthcare, education, and urban development sectors. He has worked on Northern PowerHouse Rail, hospitals, and healthcare infrastructure, in the UK, Australia, and Bahrain.