Healthcare Advisory Services

As a trusted partner to health care provider organisations around the world, we deliver a comprehensive range of advisory services to support our clients in all aspects of the funding, delivery and operation of healthcare estates.

From our long experience as advisors to the healthcare sector, we fully understand the unprecedented challenges our clients are facing in terms of funding restraints, increasing demand, rising costs of drugs and treatments and high consumer expectations in terms of their quality of care and the environments in which they are treated. Working in close collaboration with client teams, clinicians, designers and contractors, our aim is to ensure our clients’ facilities are efficient, safe, fit for purpose and financially sustainable.

We base our thinking on both current and future needs to ensure the solutions we deploy will be relevant in years to come. This ‘Future Ready’ approach ensures that large capital programmes have genuine longevity, with flexibility designed-in, in readiness for tomorrow’s challenges in terms of health trends, changing demographics, technological advances and climate change.

In the delivery of all our advisory services we are supported across the globe by our extensive staff resource for the provision of strong technical advice and support.

We support healthcare organisations in developing their estates strategies in accordance with good practice and statutory requirements. We undertake property analysis and estate reviews to provide a clear picture of the current estate context and establish what future developments are envisaged for the estate in terms of expansion plans and improvements to services and facilities, bearing in mind the need to plan for the long term. Once the organisation’s estates strategy is defined as suitable to meet its corporate and clinical goals, we then provide a framework and a capital programme of costs to deliver it, setting realistic objectives and KPIs, with options illustrating how the estate may change over time.

Our strategies are bespoke, tailored to the aims of the individual organisation, focusing on specifics such as estates and facilities costs, backlog and condition, space utilisation, new service developments, estate rationalisation, income generation, delivery capability and funding and procurement opportunities.

In developing estates strategies, we draw on the technical skills of the wider WSP organisation, including GIS modelling, building surveying, design, facilities management and sustainability services.

In this specialist role we support our clients in optimising healthcare delivery by helping develop new ways of delivering healthcare services and then planning facilities to support and enable effective healthcare services. This involves working in close collaboration with all stakeholders, including clinicians, business managers, patients and design and project teams, to develop briefs and clinically functional design solutions for new and refurbished buildings. Our services include service model development, capacity planning, preparing schedules of accommodation, developing operational policies and support with design interpretation and development. With a proactive and collaborative approach we provide independent thinking and a willingness to challenge to create safe, affordable and value-for-money solutions of the highest standards and quality, always bearing in mind our ‘Future Ready’ ethos.

We provide specialist support to healthcare operators in the preparation of business cases to secure capital funding and approvals for investment in improved services. We work closely with our clients and their professional advisors to develop comprehensive, robust business cases enabling timely approvals and the progression of projects. With approvers ranging from the healthcare operator itself to national healthcare organisations and government treasury departments, we develop the solutions and associated documentation from early outline strategy stages, through options identification and appraisal to a preferred option. We take a particular interest in ensuring that schemes in development are viable throughout the process. Drawing from the resources of the wider WSP organisation, we can also provide all the required technical input from our designers, including drawings, specifications and BREEAM/LEED or other sustainability assessments.

Moving into a new healthcare building or facility is an extremely complex operation. We offer a comprehensive range of services to help a hospital co-ordinate the efficient and seamless handover of the facility by preparing the new building, planning systematically for how services will work, relocating patients, staff and equipment safely and with minimum disruption to service levels and, if required, supporting removals procurement.

We have an excellent appreciation of the timescales involved in hospital commissioning projects, including when activities should start, how long they should take, and when they should be completed to enable other, linked activities to progress. Our plans include contingency procedures to avoid any negative impacts to operations, the costs and risk implications.

Sponsors of public sector projects are required to evaluate and learn from their projects; in some cases this is a pre-requisite for future business case approvals. We conduct Post Project Evaluations (PPE) on projects to support our clients in learning lessons and assessing and maximising the benefits from their investment. We review the processes used and identify lessons – both positive and negative – for future projects in a positive, blame-free environment. We also analyse the extent to which project objectives have been achieved by analysing and evaluating the full operation benefits data.

Our PPEs are tailored to the project and client. We employ a variety of techniques, including document reviews, questionnaires, structured interviews, facilitated workshops and on-site health design audits to form a holistic view of the project.