Designing for operation, not just construction

Through its industrialisation strategy and Hospital 2.0 approach, the New Hospital Programme is demonstrating how decisions shaping hospital delivery can also shape how hospitals are maintained, adapted and operated for decades to come. Here, Dr Abbie Romano, head of industrialisation for the NHP at NHS England, explains how, by reducing unwanted variability and strengthening the relationship between product development and operational performance, industrialisation is becoming as much a strategy for improving hospital operation as it is for improving hospital delivery.

The New Hospital Programme (NHP) represents a significant opportunity to transform how healthcare infrastructure is designed, delivered, and iteratively improved across the NHS. This is not simply about building new hospitals but about creating a sustainable and resilient system-wide capability to deliver better hospitals more consistently, with greater certainty and a clearer connection between design decisions, construction outcomes, and long-term operational performance.

Historically, healthcare infrastructure has been delivered through individual projects, each responding to its own requirements, constraints, and delivery challenges. While local context will always matter, a project-by-project approach can limit opportunities to capture learning, build supply chain confidence, and improve outcomes across a wider programme. The UK healthcare sector has already recognised many of these challenges through collaborative procurement models such as Procure, which seeks to create longer-term relationships, improve knowledge transfer, and encourage greater consistency across projects. Similar thinking has also extended to repeatable room and standardised design initiatives, demonstrating a growing recognition that value is created not only through individual projects, but through applying learning and repeatability across a portfolio of healthcare infrastructure.