Building resilience in the NHS Wales estate

After welcoming delegates to the IHEEM Wales Regional Conference 2026, IHEEM CEO Pete Sellers introduced the event's theme of Navigating uncertainty — contingency and resilience in healthcare estates. Faced with both the everyday pressures of running of NHS states and facilities and the global pressures that have seen a rise in uncertainty across the board — not least when it comes to the cost of everything from energy to construction materials — resilience in healthcare estates — and indeed healthcare personnel — is becoming ever more key when it comes to an NHS that is continually having to do "more with less" under sustained pressure.

Exploring these themes, the first keynote of the two-day event was A view from the bridge from Jacqueline Totterdell, director general for health and social services and NHS Wales chief executive. Speaking via video, Jacqueline began by recognising the key importance of healthcare engineers and estates managers.

"Thank you so much for inviting me to talk with you at your conference today," she began. "Engineers and estates professionals are critical to the safe, reliable, and resilient operation of NHS Wales and directly underpin patient care and service continuity. You manage our infrastructure risks, statutory compliance, and all of our safety systems, like power, heating, ventilation, medical gases — I could go on — and all of those impact on health service operations and performance.