A new not-for-profit community interest company (CIC) established by ‘a group of leading experts’ across healthcare, academia, and the built environment, says it will seek ‘to empower healthcare leaders with the skills, knowledge, and tools, to maximise the value and impact of their participation in capital development projects.’
Those who have come together to establish Healthcare Design Leadership say it is ‘a first of its kind in the UK’. Its aim will be ‘to help every NHS Trust become a highly informed client at all levels’ – by training clinical and managerial NHS personnel on how to effectively engage in the design and development process of hospitals and other healthcare buildings.
A collaboration between healthcare planners, MJ Medical, specialist healthcare architects Llewelyn Davies, and Professor Ashok Handa, Professor of Vascular Surgery and Director of Teaching in Surgery at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences at the University of Oxford, Healthcare Design Leadership boasts ‘a truly multidisciplinary faculty’. This includes clinicians, healthcare planners, architects, contractors, and researchers. In addition to the founding partners, contributors to the training programme include representatives from a variety of organisations, including Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, Sir Robert McAlpine, WSP, and TClarke.
Healthcare Design Leadership said: “As the key users of healthcare buildings alongside patients and their families, it is vital for doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and managers, to be the principal stakeholders in the full lifecycle of planning and designing new healthcare facilities. A growing body of research has identified that – all too often – a gap in understanding and skills means the value that these stakeholders’ input has on the design and development process is less than it could be. This can cause the resulting design to be sub-optimal, frustrating potential efficiency gains, and compromising the improvements in clinical care realised when organisation and building are working in unison.”
Through their ‘extensive experience of healthcare capital development’, Healthcare Design Leadership’s founders seek to address this through ‘the provision of a comprehensive package of knowledge transfer, delivered in a variety of ways’, to NHS Trusts and personnel. They said: “By enabling healthcare leaders and practitioners to enhance their skills and engagement in the briefing, planning, design, construction, and commissioning process, we hope to shape the way healthcare will be delivered in the future by developing world-class new buildings.”
Professor Ashok Handa, director of Healthcare Design Leadership CIC (pictured), said: “We recognised the need for this type of training, and wanted to utilise our combined skills and experience to support NHS leaders in a variety of roles within the healthcare system, be it clinician, manager, Estates team or a Chief Executive. It was important to us to deliver world-class training, on a not-for-profit basis, at the lowest possible cost to the NHS.”
Kate Bradley, senior consultant at MJ Medical, and also a director of Healthcare Design Leadership CIC said: “We are really excited to put together this comprehensive training programme. The more we discussed the idea with industry colleagues, the more enthusiasm we generated – enabling us to build a multidisciplinary team of industry leaders, with decades of experience in planning and delivering new healthcare buildings in the UK and internationally. All of our team agreed to provide their time pro bono, and share the belief that the course generates genuine social value, which aligns perfectly with our collective passion to support the NHS.”
Healthcare Design Leadership delivers its CPD-accredited training in a variety of ways, including bespoke tailored courses for individual NHS Trusts, and residential courses at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, open to all. The next residential course will take place on 22 and 23 March 2023. Having already delivered training to over 50 people at several acute London Trusts embarking on major hospital redevelopment projects, the overwhelming feedback on the course was ‘very positive’, with 100% of attendees saying they would recommend the course to a colleague.