The age of flexible infrastructure

The National Health Service waiting lists are at their highest since 2008, standing at nearly three million and, as of April 2015, nearly 10% of patients are waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment. In addition, the NHS is costing the taxpayer 2.5 times more than it did 50 years ago, now accounting for 8.2% of the UK’s GDP. Trusts are becoming the subject of a media-frenzy as targets are missed and financial troubles come to light. At the same time, political debate is reducing real people, with real needs, to statistics and targets. It is all too easy to forget that the inability to treat people in a timely fashion is a humanitarian issue.

All of the major political parties pledged to provide the NHS with more funding, and the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats, SNP and the Green party all pledged to meet the request set out in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View report for an additional £8 bn a year by 2020, during the recent election. However, promising extra cash and accusing each other of mass mismanagement every five years does not solve the crippling challenges faced by healthcare organisations up and down the country. There is no blanket solution to these multifaceted challenges. No two Trusts are the same, and so no two Trusts face the same issues.

Take the physical capacity of the NHS estate, for example. The NHS estate is mostly made up of bricks, mortar and concrete, and physically increasing its capacity takes millions of pounds, years of planning and months of building, and that is only if the Trust can avoid getting tangled in the red tape of planning permission.