How Hospital 2.0 can change the way we build healthcare in the UK

Just last month contracts have been signed that move the New Hospital Programme’s Hospital 2.0 Alliance from procurement into delivery. For us, that means confirmation of something we have been working towards for months: Willmott Dixon will partner with Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust (RCHT) to deliver the new Women and Children’s Hospital in Truro.

For RCHT, this is the realisation of a long-held ambition, to bring acute maternity, neonatal, paediatric and gynaecology services together under one roof in what will be a modern, purpose-built, digitally-enabled healthcare facility. Cornwall is a rural peninsula served by a single acute provider for around 500,000 people across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Distance matters here in a way it doesn’t elsewhere. For a family in the far west of the county, a hospital designed properly around them is incredibly important.

What strikes me about RCHT’s ambition is that it reaches beyond the clinical brief. The trust wants this building to be a source of civic pride and to make a real contribution to Cornwall’s long-term economic and social prosperity. That is exactly the kind of brief we want to be handed, and we are looking forward to helping bring it to fruition.

Just across the Tamar, our Wales & West team is already on site at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, delivering the £140m Emergency Care Building for University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, the first scheme in wave one of the New Hospital Programme to begin main construction.

What we are learning at Derriford - about working within the New Hospital Programme environment, about building safely and quietly inside a live and pressured clinical environment, and about meeting the NHS Net Zero Building Standard - now travels the 60 miles west with us.

A major hospital scheme is a key moment when sustained, high-quality work becomes available to local firms

The significance of supply chain partnerships deserves more than a passing mention. In a region like the far South-west, a major hospital scheme is a key moment when sustained, high-quality work becomes available to local firms. We set deliberate targets for local spend within 10, 20 and 40 miles of our sites, because it is how the investment stays close to the building it paid for.

On comparable health projects that has meant millions of pounds spent with businesses within 40 miles, alongside apprenticeships, T-level placements and our Building Lives Academies, which give people facing barriers to employment a genuine route into the industry.

Two significant NHS schemes in the same region, delivered by the same business, also give local suppliers something important: visibility. A Cornish firm can invest, hire and train against work it can see coming.

What makes the New Hospital Programme’s Hospital 2.0 Alliance different

For decades, hospitals were procured one at a time. Each had its own design, its own team and its own hard-won lessons, most of which quietly evaporated at practical completion. The alliance is designed to stop that happening.

Ten construction partners now sit inside a single structure alongside the New Hospital Programme, NHS trusts, designers and the wider supply chain, working to Hospital 2.0’s standardised designs and technical standards. The advantages compound. Because a substantial proportion of the design is common across schemes, effort is concentrated on what is genuinely specific to each site and each community.

An improvement found on one hospital is captured once and deployed across every scheme that follows

As the structure is built for it, an improvement found on one hospital is captured once and deployed across every scheme that follows. This is a visible long-term pipeline that can support further investment in modern methods of construction and offsite manufacturing. And because NHS Trusts remain firmly in the lead, national consistency is achieved without local leadership being diluted.

This brings a big ask of us as contractors. Nine other tier one businesses are in this alliance, so we can sit in the same room and be candid about what has gone wrong, what has worked well, where we can share knowledge and how we combine this to help everyone, because that is the only way the programme improves.

The implications of this collaboration reach well past the NHS estate. Structured alliancing has already proved itself in justice and defence. What is different here is the combination of programme-level collaboration, a standardised design platform and industrialised delivery – all happening at once.

That is a model with obvious relevance to energy, education, water and transport. Indeed it is applicable to any national programme where the country needs to build a great deal of the same thing well, repeatedly, and where it cannot afford to relearn the same lessons every time.

For an industry too often characterised by fragmentation and short horizons, that is a genuinely optimistic prospect.

RCHT’s long-standing ambition and a programme deliberately built for collaboration have both arrived at the same moment. Now let’s build something that serves many thousands of people over many generations.

Graham Dundas is chief executive officer of Willmott Dixon