Minister pledges to ‘support sector from the centre’

Speaking on the second day of October’s Healthcare Estates 2017 conference, Lord James O’Shaughnessy, the Parliamentary under Secretary of State for Health at the Department of Health, and chair of the recently established Estates Programme Board, acknowledged the considerable effort that the healthcare estates and facilities and engineering community had already put in towards achieving the goals of the Lord Carter and Robert Naylor Reports. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie reports, the Minister told a sizeable audience he would be making it a priority to ‘do everything I can from the centre’ to provide the sector with the support it needed going forward.

The opening keynote speaker on the second day of Healthcare Estates 2017, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, Lord O’Shaughnessy, was introduced by IHEEM’s President, Pete Sellars, who said: “It is a great honour for our Minister to travel from London this morning to come and talk to you about his thoughts on the future of our estate. You have a fantastic opportunity to hear from him, and, subsequently, to put your questions to him.” 

Lord O’Shaughnessy said he was delighted to be able to present at the 2017 IHEEM conference: “I really wanted to come to this year’s IHEEM conference,” he explained, “because I wanted to underline to you all in the healthcare engineering and estate management sector how important the work you do is to our plans as a Government, and to the NHS for the transformation of our health services. I also wanted to have the chance to explain my thinking on where we are going"