Estates Strategy, Planning & Solutions

Latest Insights from our team

Supporting the shift from Hospital to Community Care

This roadmap provides a structured guide for Integrated Care Boards and their system partners seeking to optimise the out-of-hospital estate in line with the agenda of shifting care from hospitals to community settings.

Latest Guidance

Estates_Strategy_Planning_and_Solutions_cropped_landscape

Space Optimisation and Planning

We can maximise the functionality of your clinical spaces to enhance both patient care and operational efficiency. This includes leveraging the use of sensors to ensure informed, data-driven decision making. We also review patient and staff flows, clinical adjacencies and building stacking.

Space Utilisation Surveys

We install temporary sensors to reveal hidden capacity and real-time usage patterns across your estate—delivering heatmaps, gap analysis, and practical recommendations that optimise space, reduce costs, and strengthen your business case for transformation, without the need for costly new builds.

Sensor-Driven Intelligence

We install permanently fixed sensors, delivering continuous data to power real-time space management, hybrid working models, and Net Zero strategies. Live dashboards, benchmarking, and trend analysis support strategic estates planning, enabling smarter, more flexible use of space and investment across buildings, teams, and systems.

Estate Strategy

We support you to craft a strategic vision to align your estates portfolio and plans to wider objectives ensuring physical and financial sustainability and resilience in your infrastructure. Estates blueprints translate these into implementation plans for improvement

Demand & Capacity Modelling

We analyse activity and key operational parameters to understand the demand for clinical rooms and beds, optimising their allocation within healthcare facilities across the system. We assess the workforce to determine the space to support their needs.

Schedules of Accommodation

We develop robust schedules of accommodation compliant with Health Building Notes (HBNs) and informed workforce and activity modelling. These tools are critical in informing financial assessment and ensuring that all buildings meet regulatory requirements.

Service Model Development

We combine population health needs assessments with evidence-based workforce and clinical models to develop an overarching model of care. This ensures your estates plans can deliver your wider objectives while being future proofed for technological and demand changes.

Business Case

We create HMT compliant business cases to assess options and ensure project affordability. From Strategic Outline Case and Project Initiation Documentation through to Outline and Full Business Cases, we combine analysis of feasibility, costs, benefits and risks with technical requirements.

Identifying Your Hidden Capacity

NHS estates are facing growing pressures including budget constraints, Net Zero targets, hybrid working and ICS integration. Paired with a £13bn+ maintenance backlog, limited visibility of usage and complex approval processes, organisations are struggling to respond effectively. The first step in making progress is to identify how space is used currently and where improvements can be made.

With partners Abintra, we have developed two estates optimisation solutions: Short-Term Space Utilisation Surveys, and Long-Term Sensor Deployment. These solutions pair strategic interpretation with people engagement, answer specific organisational questions, align with ICS-wide planning and Net Zero priorities and have been designed for real-world implementation and change.

Short-Term Space Utilisation Surveys

Benefits:

Optimises space to improve scheduling and access
Identifies underused assets and justifies space rationalisation
Strengthens capital and transformation business cases
Avoids unnecessary new-builds and associated costs

Typical Outputs:

Heatmaps of occupancy
Gap analysis between booking data and actual use
Practical, data-driven recommendations for improvement
Team engagement findings and implementation support

CleanShot-2025-02-14-at-15.28.37@2x

Long-Term Sensor Deployment

Benefits:

Enables strategic, real-time space management
Supports long-term digital estates planning at system level
Provides trend analysis for planning flexibility, peaks, and patterns
Informs agile/hybrid models and targeted estates investment

Typical Outputs:

Live dashboards with weekly/monthly analytics
Benchmarking across buildings and services
Longitudinal space usage trends
Integration with estates planning and Net Zero tracking tools