Health Service Focus

What's mine is yours

The NHS and local authorities are going to be finding themselves working much closer together in the future – and facilities are no exception. Adam Hewitt reports.

Changes in the way that public health and social care are provided will mean new ways of working between the NHS and local councils, while Health & Wellbeing Boards will get elected councillors involved in the oversight of healthcare in a much more direct way than the present system of JSNAs and other arrangements.

But as well as these changes, and as well as closer working on emergency preparedness, and attempts to align the budgetsetting processes of local government and the NHS, many organisations on both sides of the divide are seeing the potential to cut costs while make more efficient use of space by sharing their estate.

Local authorities and NHS organisations in areas as diverse as Herefordshire, Blackburn, Torbay, Northumberland and North East Lincolnshire have been seeking or deepening such partnerships.

Jonathan Stewart, chairman of the East of England branch of HEFMA (the Health Estates & Facilities Management Association), writes in the latest edition of the organisation’s magazine, for example: “Another positive spin-off from the dire national financial situation has been the willingness of local public sector organisations to work together to share accommodation and develop joint solutions to meet local needs.”

This “opens up tremendous opportunities”, he says, while acknowledging the bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of such partnership working over property.

Some of these conversations have also included bodies from elsewhere in the public sector, including police and fire services, and local branches of Government agencies and departments. Devon, for example, has been working to establish a Public Sector Property Asset Board with membership across all these sorts of organisations, while in West Sussex, the county hall at Horsham is being shared between the council, HMRC and the Health Protection Agency. Many of these agreements had their genesis before the current QIPP efficiencies drive and NHS reforms; since 2009, for example, Herefordshire has seen NHS organisations and the council sharing services and allowing hot-desking, so staff from any organisation in the partnership can work anywhere else.

Along with the significant effect that the NHS reforms will also have on the health service estate, with the clustering of PCTs and SHAs and their upcoming abolition, such partnership arrangements are going to become more and more common.

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