Mike Hilditch, managing director of auctioneers, Hilditch Group, which has extensive experience in selling equipment on behalf of the NHS, advises, via a seven-step guide, on some of the key elements for estates and facilities teams to consider to ensure that site clearances both go to plan and reap maximum financial reward, including safeguarding potentially valuable ‘kit’ against opportunist thieves, and preventing confidential paperwork falling into the wrong hands.
The NHS is constantly adapting to cope with changing demographics. More money has been pumped into infrastructure for the service over the past 10 years, as a result of which new hospitals and clinics have been developed, and old sites closed. Services have been combined or privatised and office space rationalised. As a consequence, there is almost unlimited advice available on every aspect of building a new facility. However, in our experience there is a shortage of advice out there on what to do with the old crumbling ruin that was once a ‘stateof-the art’ A&E department or administration block.
New-build projects are planned years in advance, involve countless meetings, and generate a forest of documents, reports, proposals, and plans. Often, however, little thought is given to how to physically move from A to B, and what happens to A once it is vacated. New-builds are exciting; being given £50 m to spend on a modern hospital with gleaming corridors and towering atria is much more stimulating than working out what to do with 300 old desks or the accumulation of 50 years’ rubbish in the old boiler house, and very little thought is given to the value of the items that are not being transferred.
Costs can be ‘in the millions’
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